Writing on the Web with mozex

12 August 2004

I had heard about mozex before but never tried it until I read Clay Shirky’s rants about writing on the Web here, here, and here.

Mozex is an extension which allows the user to use external programs for these actions:

  • view page source
  • edit content of textareas (possibly utilizing a spell-checker in the text editor)
  • handle mailto, news, telnet and FTP links
  • download files

Basically it works like this: I want to write in a textarea on a Web page; right-clicking in the textarea brings up a menu for mozex which lets me choose “Edit textarea” which launches my editor of preference. I proceed to write, then save my work in the editor. When I return to the browser, I click in the textarea and everything from the editor gets pasted.

OK, this is nice :). I think it would be great for faculty and students who complain about not having a spellcheck feature in our EMS.

One quick note about mozex: the options dialog doesn’t show up under Extensions in Firefox 0.9.2. To fix this I had to install another extension called “Show old extensions” which you can find here.

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