Mozex with UTF-8

This page is obsolete. It's left up as an archive, but several of the links are broken, and the information is no longer useful.

Mozex allows you to use external applications for more things than normally possible when using Mozilla (Firefox). I used it to edit large text areas in web forms with my favourite text editor (vim).

At one point Mozex was unmaintained. At that time I packaged a version that merged a couple of patches so it would work for me. The details are below. Now, thanks to Vladimír Marek, Mozex is maintained again and you should go with the official version.

Update 2008-04-26: On upgrading to Firefox 3, mozex was disabled. I found It’s All Text!, which does a similar job and seemed to be more actively maintained. I’ve swapped to that and found that it works more robustly too.


OLD: Mozex with UTF-8 in Firefox 1.5

The original version (local copy) did not work properly for me with Firefox 1.5. This and other problems are addressed in an updated version (local copy).

I use the UTF-8 Unicode/UCS encoding for all text processing. Unfortunately neither of the above versions of Mozex work for me with non-ASCII text. Another modification to the original Mozex fixes this issue by forcing use of UTF-8 (local copy of this patch).

The UTF-8 patch applied cleanly to the updated version of Mozex that works in Firefox 1.5. This fixed all my problems without having to do anything clever myself. I thought I may as well put the result on the web:

Install a UTF-8 forcing, Firefox 1.5 compatible version of Mozex.

I make no guarantees about this extension; you use it at your own risk. I did not write any of this code and do not know anything about writing Firefox extensions; it is highly unlikely I can help with any problems you encounter.

For documentation see the original Mozex page. You will need to do some configuration before it will do anything useful.