The XUL challenge

What if I could throw away all ( I say all but really I use a terminal and firefox and thats about it... ) the apps I use and find alternatives that work with XUL ( with or without firefox I dont really mind ). Im already running my email, calendar, rss reader and music from firefox tabs... The trouble is in my terminal ill run vim, irssi and do whatever file managing I need to do in there too.

One solution might be to write a curses lib ontop of canvas then run a shell as usual... Iv already written a term in python so this cant be much harder! Trouble here is that there is no way to run a process and read/write to its stdin/out in firefox/XUL apps. If I could get pyxpcom to work it would be easy...

The other, possibly better solution, is to start using something like bespin ( which unfortunatly is in the middle of a rewrite and not useable yet ). I wouldnt mind using that if I could make it very vim like. I could probably use it to do some simple file management too. That would just leave irssi... chatzilla? "meh"

I would find it most amusing to run firefox in my .xinit and have no window manager... we shall see.

A step... urr.. backwards?

I talked before about my thought process and the start of my browser. I did some more on the browser but it all got a bit annoying and not exciting enough to keep my attention.

Well since then Iv used selenium a lot at work which includes a firefox extension that provides an IDE. Iv hacked a little on it and looked around trying to work out how to do various things and generally understood a bit more about firefox extensions. Enough indeed to get me looking more and more at firefox extensions and finally I understand enough to write my own.

So... now Iv written the plugin that started me writing my own browser. Dont really need that browser anymore... it was interesting and I may still go back to it yet - but for the moment Im now happy with firefox again. I say happy, I mean mostly satisfied!

Firefox code is quite fun - if you like javascript - which I do have a sick fascination with. Im not sure the XUL/firefox docs are that great but then browsing source always keeps me more interested than reading straight forward docs anyway. Chromebug (firebug for XUL) works quite well - tho Iv had to revert to writing my own debug log functions which is annoying. Im too used to firebug and using its console.

I probably should of mentioned what my extension did by now - it keeps activity information associated with each tab ( Im calling activity any clicking/scrolling/key pressing ). It then provides a menu item to show a dialog with a list of all your tabs sorted by activity. You can select many items at once and close them. This means I can quickly close all the tabs I havent touched in X amount of hours.

Iv also added to the plugin a way to quickly assign a shortcut key to a tab so I can skip around. Kind of like temporary bookmarks.

What Id really like is to drop tabs altogether and go for something a bit more interesting to choose what Im looking at... also Im thinking I should start using bookmarks in some clever way... but this is for another day.

Extension is here http://github.com/dunkfordyce/dunks_gubbins/tree/master/tooomanytabs/