mozex + cygwin to edit Firefox textareas in X11 emacs

I may be a bit extreme, but if anyone else wants to do this, it's remarkably easy.

Assuming you already use emacs under cygwin, first make a batch file to abstract the wierdness. I use the dtemacs wrapper for gnuserv, but you can substitute any cygwin X11 editor in for dtemacs below (or xterm -e 'ed' if you are so inclined).

dtemacs.bat:

@echo off

SET DISPLAY=:0.0
SET RUN="C:\Program Files\Cygwin\bin\run" -p /usr/X11R6/bin

%RUN% bash -wait -c "/usr/local/bin/dtemacs `/bin/cygpath -u '%1'`"

The call to cygpath in the backticks converts the path supplied by mozex from something like c:\temp\asdfhasdfjh into /cygdrive/c/temp/asdfasdfdsf that emacs can understand.

Then install mozex into Firefox. Mozex works fine under firefox 1.0 and later, but you can't seem to access the config gui anywhere. You can, however, easily add the following lines to your prefs.js:

user_pref("mozex.command.textarea", "C:\\Progra~1\\Cygwin\\usr\\local\\bin\\dtemacs.bat %t");
user_pref("mozex.general.tmpdir", "c:\\temp");

Adjust the above as per your cygwin directory and note that you have to use the 8.3 form of pathname in the mozex userpref.

Now I can edit twiki pages in X11 emacs via my windows firefox - smashing!

Update: The above link for mozex now directs you to a new development version of mozex that has a preferences UI that works with Firefox 1.5. I haven't tried upgrading my Windows Firefox yet, but it works a treat on MacOS X. It has even fixed the issue where you had to click in the textarea to update the content :)

01:33 PM, 16 Jan 2006 by Mark Aufflick Permalink

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