version 0.7.3
This software is ALMOST version 1.0! It's inches from being ready to go. Please report any problems you have to help!
It's All Text! gives you a simple way to edit textareas, the large text boxes in forms, using your favorite editor.
Upon installation, go to the menu Tools -> It's All Text! -> Preferences to set your preferences. Specifically, you'll have to set the editor's full path.
There are three ways to use It's All Text!:
Here is a test edit box for you to play with…
Ciao!
Out of the box, It's All Text! uses the open
program. open
behaves like double clicking on a file. It uses the type of the file to choose the correct application to run; for .txt files, that application is the built-in text editor.
If this behavior is fine for you, then leave the editor option alone and enjoy!
However, if you want to use a different editor or to force the same editor regardless of the file type, then you will need to do something a little more complicated.
Firefox cannot run .app applications directly. To run a program in Mac OS X you need to do one of two things: If your editor comes with a non-.app
version, then use that. Otherwise you have to write a shell script.
Check your editor's documentation; if it comes with a standalone program, usually located in the /usr/bin/
directory, then you can enter that into the It's All Text! preferences and you're done.
Otherwise, you need to create a shell script. Here are the basic steps to create a shell script:
~/iat.sh
chmod +x ~/iat.sh
The example shell script. Replace /path/to/editor.app
with the actual path to your .app file. It'll probably be something like /Applications/MyEditor.app
.
#!/bin/sh
# This is an example shell script for It's All Text!
open -a /path/to/editor.app $*
Other alternative shell scripts are available at here.
In UNIX systems, such as Mac OS X or Linux, you can create a shell script with your commands in it.
In windows, you can create a .cmd file instead.
Gmail, blogger, and other sites has the option to use "rich text editors". The editors act similar to a word processor. Due to the way these work, it isn't possible for It's All Text! find the textarea, it is hidden or, in some cases, absent.
Workaround: Turn off the rich text editor, if possible.
The problem is that the encoding It's All Text! is using and your editor is using don't match. You can figure out what encoding your editor wants and change the encodings preference in It's All Text! or you can change the encoding your editor uses.
A common problem I get is that someone is using Notepad or WordPad in Windows. These both do not support sane encodings. I recommend getting something like Notepad++ for editing in UTF-8 instead.