Everyone has an editor of choice, and when it comes to editing text areas, like wiki content or even just generic contact forms and doing posts in forums or blogs its quite irritating to not get access to that editor.

The only way to get access to that editor is to have it launch on some hot key, then when the textarea box comes up, do a select-all, cut and paste that content into the editor - then when you are done, select-all from the editor and paste that into the textarea. You could do this by hand, but its quite a pain. In most cases it then boils down to which kind of pain you want to suffer. The lack of a decent editor built into firefox, or the copy + paste pain of moving content between apps. The best medium would be if there was an app that would do this for you, and there is. Called 'Its all Text!. And its a addon to firefox that does just this sort of a thing. The project home page is here.

You install it as an addon, go into the preferences and select what editor you want to use. Then when a textarea comes up, a small button comes up, by default on the lower right corner and clicking that will launch your editor, with the command line specified and let you do the edit etc. When you are done, just save and quit. the addon will check the tempfile it setup for changes, and paste them back into the text area. If you want the 'edit' button somewhere else you can change that in the addons preferences. I prefer the top left instead of the bottom right - since in lots of cases, the text area for wiki pages etc is quite large and I dont get the bottom right without needed to scroll the window a bit.

RPMS for CentOS-5 are here : i386 x86_64 Just click the Arch you need them for and it should install the addon.

- KB