Edit (or just filter) the currently selected textarea using a web request.
This extension allows you to edit (or just filter) the contents of a textarea on a web page. Since Chrome does not allow the running of an external program directly, this extension instead makes an ajax call to a web server, which can start up a graphical editor, or perform any kind of filtering you desire. The URL that is used is configurable in the options.
When a textarea receives the focus (e.g. if you click in one), the icon will get a click action (indicated by the mouse-over title text). When left-clicked, an ajax request will process the currently-selected textarea and update the value when the request is done (e.g. when the editor exits). You can also assign a keystroke to use to activate the editor (I like Alt-Enter), which allows you to leave the extension's icon unpinned.
Change Log:
1.0.8 - Renamed TextAid to TextEditAid & tweaked for newer chrome.
1.0.7 - Tweaked the OK/Cancel buttons on the options page.
1.0.6 - A fix for Mac OS X that made clicking on the icon not work.
1.0.5 - Include the status text in the failure alert so it is clearer what needs to be fixed.
1.0.4 - Avoid spurious failure alerts after a successful update. Added support for http basic auth (you'll need an updated version of edit-server or whatever script you're using).
1.0.3 - Added a configurable keyboard shortcut (defaults to disabled).
1.0.2 - Fixed a newly-introduced bug with the field editing.
1.0.1 - Changed event capturing method so that focusing any textarea shows the clickable icon.
The edit-server script that I wrote (in perl) for use with TextEditAid:
http://opencoder.net/edit-server
Another option are the servers written for the emacs_chrome project (the python one worked fine when last I looked at it, though it was only single-threaded). You could also supply your own server script, or run a CGI under a normal web server. See the options page for more information on the POST request used.
Latest reviews
- (2017-01-27) Frank Utne: This extension does not work on Youtube. The only reason I installed this is because Youtube textarea goes back to previous page when I am just trying to select a word with alt-left arrow that works on every site but Youtube. Google developers are really incompetent. I mean why would they even think of mapping this common key combination to Back?
- (2014-12-22) iLemming: Aaah... please fix it for gmail, inbox and twitter, and many other web apps!
- (2014-07-01) Marco Kellershoff: This is simply amazing!
- (2014-04-25) Fergus Cameron: Lovely, I can now have chrome switch out to gvim in cygwin (and access text processors therein).
- (2013-10-09) José Leal Domingues Neto: Cool, but it doesn't recognize gmail. Would be cool if you could take a look..
- (2013-03-29) Moritz Bunkus: I love this, have been using for quite some time. With gmail's newest update, however, TextAid doesn't recognize the mail form edit field as a edit field anymore. Any chance you could take a look at it?
- (2012-11-13) Ethan M: Merely had to set $REQUIRE_AUTH to 0, and correct the $EDITOR_CMD for the edit-server perl script process to get things working!
- (2012-10-23) Josh Bergasse: Awesome, ran the python server listed in the options page, and tweaked it to launch gVim instead of emacs, once I added gVim's directory to Windows' PATH and then changed the port to match the server and it works! The options page could use some CSS though!
- (2012-02-29) Can't get it to work. Doesn't seem to be sending anything to the edit-server. Edit server is running because I can browse to edit-server which returns: "Server is up and running. To use it, issue a POST request with the file to edit as the content body." Have altered edit-server.pl for mvim and no authentication. When running in Terminal with --verbose, I see some output when contacting it via web browser but no output when trying to invoke TextAid in a text area. Have tried setting different key combinations, e.g. Ctrl-M, Ctrl-Alt-E, etc. Can't find anything that produces a response. I'm running: Chrome 17.0.963.56 OS X 10.6.7 MacVim editor (/usr/local/bin/mvim) I'd like to get this to work. Any suggestions for further debugging? Thanks, Mike