View Page Source Code In Your Favourite Text Editor

Viewing the source of the How-To Geek's article with this trick crashes Notepad++ for me. I don't think firefox/notepad++ handle special characters in the page title very well.

taziar

This has been available for many, many years, as an option, even in the very earliest versions of Internet Explorer. Recently it has become harder to find but you can still do it:
Hit F12 (to open Development Tools)
File/Customize Internet Explorer View Source ...

and select the path to your favourite editor.

jmjstandin

@StevieQ: You, sir, do win one Internets. I was trying /Applications/TextMate or /Applications/TextMate.app Now to try to figure out opening vim in Terminal with that...

@StevieQ: Awesome, thank you!

@Zkdog: I just use ctrl+U and noticed the same thing. that is a lot of space for code

phayte28

Works on the mac as well. Nice tip. I used to use that extension, but this handles it and one less add-on.

Note for the mac, you will need to "Show Package Contents" to find the actual executable, such as:

/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/MacOS/TextMate

StevieQ

Good tip.

As an aside, I've enjoyed Notepad++ until last week I noticed that it does not respect form feed characters (^Q or Ctrl-Q) which many text editors interpret as hard page breaks. Disappointing.

Very nice!

@AmphetamineCrown: I give up... How do you put html in comments without having it render?

AmphetamineCrown

@AmphetamineCrown: Yup, ampersand codes in the comments are rendering the into text. If it doesn't work with the ampersand "nbsp" for space, then try ampersand "#40;" for the open paren and ampersand "#41;" for the close paren.

Let's see if the code tag works (otherwise this will look like gibberish):

Use   for the space
Use ( for the open parenthesis--"("
Use ) for the close parenthesis--")"

AmphetamineCrown

@Zkdog: It's not the +s... I've got those in my pathname and its OK. Try " " instead of the space--in case that doesn't show, it's ampersand followed by "nbsp" (without quotes) for nonbreaking space.

AmphetamineCrown

...what you can with the browser itself instead of addons.

Sorry.

This is a great tip. I used to have to struggle with a bloated, buggy Firefox addon to do this, and just found out about this tip a few weeks ago.

It's always best to achieve

This is great I just set it up without a problem.

damnflanders

test@Bob McLain: That is a great add-on. Thank you very much!

USBhack

@pale_blue_eyes: I'm thinking either the space or the +'s are throwing off FF. Maybe try moving it to a directory with no special characters in the path?

Zkdog

@32ndnote: Holy white space Batman! I've never looked at any of the Gawker sites code until you just said that. I don't think I've ever seen so much space in code in my life.

Zkdog

Works like a charm. Thanks, LH! I've been looking for a solution to that problem for a while.

As an aside: anyone know how to set Notepad++ to word wrap by default?

Is there a way to get this to work with Vim on OSX?

toolshedtherapy

@AmphetamineCrown: Yep, just checked to make sure. Even have tried the path with and without enclosing quotes, with both German and English folder names. Here's the path I am using:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\Notepad++.exe"

pale_blue_eyes

@pale_blue_eyes: Did you view_source.editor.external to true? Did you set the the path to notepad++ to include the final "/notepad++.exe" at the end?

AmphetamineCrown

Doesn't work for me. Still just opens a new firefox window. Could it be a problem with the path being C:/Program Files (x86)..... with the spaces?

tmanAg08

I just use the Firebug add-on for all my source-code viewing needs.

ratcore

Hmmm,for some reason it's not working for me. Could it have something to do with having Win 7 in the German version? When I copy the path to Notepad++ in Explorer it converts the folder names to English, which AFAIK it's supposed to do -- but maybe that screws FF up?

pale_blue_eyes

@Nabeel: I don't think that is correct. Until I did these steps, my results were like kflott's -- the text opened in another FF window, NOT my default text editor. Look at the settings you are changing--the first (view_source.editor.external) is being changed from "false" to "true," which means that the default is NOT to use an external editor, default or not.

AmphetamineCrown

What a great tip! I'm trying it out right away...

pale_blue_eyes

@atomic.resistance:
That's because Notepad is the default editor on your operating system.
The article clearly says how to make the source code open in your favorite text editor.

Suppose you use Notepad++ or Notepad2 or some other editor and want to read the source code in that specific editor, then you need to change these about:config entries.

@atomic.resistance: Control + U for me opens the source in another firefox window and I haven't made any settings for it

The ViewSourceWith Firefox extension does the same thing and lots more:

[addons.mozilla.org]

As far as I know, this doesn't require any about:config tricks. Just pressing Control + U opens the source code of a webpage in Notepad, and I don't remember changing anything about source codes in about:config.

atomic.resistance

This is perfect! I've been doing this a lot the past few days, and noticing things like, whoever does the Gawker sites must really like a lot of space in their code.

@smunsch: Open terminal
Type:
"vim"

SloYerRoll