Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Writing blog posts with Emacs

I'll be writing all my blog posts with Emacs (using html-mode), as Emacs is my favorite editor. But a big part of why I use Emacs for this, when a fancy web editor already is present in my browser, is the Firefox plug-in "It's All Text!". This simple plug-in allows me to pop into Emacs from any text box in Firefox, edit the content of the text box as if it was a normal file, save it, pop back to Firefox and watch the content of the text box change to what I just wrote in Emacs! The only setup required was to point "It's All Text!" to my editor program, and setup a shortcut to activate it - and voila: seamless integration between Firefox and Emacs. As a nice side effect, the texts are saved locally, thus I don't have to worry about a browser failure which usually would require me to write the text from scratch once more.

Before switching to "It's All Text!", I used Firemacs. Firemacs provides Emacs like bindings/shortcuts to the text boxes of Firefox - but when it comes to editing longer texts (such as this), then a fully fledged Emacs is superior to a few bindings.

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