Using it’s all text on Mac OS X
Introduction
As a system administrator, I dislike to edit text in Firefox (or any other webbrowser), for example to write a new post on this blog, or edit some contents in drupal. This morning, I was looking for a Firefox extension allowing to use an external editor (in my case vim, for sure) to edit contents of textarea. This extension is pretty simple, you only need to configure which command to run to edit the file.
However there is a big trouble with Mac OS X, indeed, I was not able to find a command line to open a new terminal tab and lauching vim with the file to edit. Indeed, something like:
% open -a iTerm /usr/bin/vim
is working fine, however, it’s not possible to do something like:
% open -a iTerm /usr/bin/vim -- /tmp/file_to_edit
That’s very inconvenient, isn’t it! So, the only way I found to achieve that is to write an AppleScript to open a new iTerm, using vim profile (which runs vim as startup), and then open the file by sending text to vim from the AppleScript. But, once gain, I run out of luck. Indeed, the filename computed by it’s all text contains spaces, and vim expect escaped spaces. So, I look for a way to replace string in AppleScript, but… guess what? it’s seem very difficult (because I need to create another file..). So the only simple solution I found is to create a shell script that create a symbolic link in /tmp to the file to edit.. Here we go!
Configuration
iTerm
Open your bookmarks manager, and create a new bookmark like
that:
Open a terminal, create the directory ~/bin, create the file
editfile with the following contents (replace bbonfils
with your login name):
#!/bin/zsh extension=${1:e} link="/tmp/firefox."$$".${extension}" ln -s "$1" $link /Users/bbonfils/bin/editfile.scpt $link
Create a new file named editfile.scpt with the following contents:
#!/usr/bin/osascript
on run argv
tell application "iTerm"
activate
make new terminal
tell the last terminal
launch session "vim"
tell the last session
write text "^[[:e " & item 1 of argv
end tell
end tell
end tell
end run
Ensure both are executable chmod +x, and then configure it’s all text
to use the first script to open file (/User/bbonfils/bin/editfile), and
now it should work!
The last word
Note I can’t remove the link in the script, since all of them are executed in background,
if you add a rm in the think, the link will be removed few seconds after you start vim,
so your textarea contents won’t be updated.
And yes, I know, it’s ugly, if you have a better way to achieve that, please post it in comments!
