MozRepl lets you program Firefox from the inside

wiki.github.com

36 points·Jebdm··7 comments

Emacs users may wish to check out this hack (reload browser via MozRepl on save): http://hyperstruct.net/projects/mozrepl/emacs-integration

It's quite neat, but very easy to get confused: if you switch to a different tab to read documentation for example, then make an edit and save, it will try and load into the new tab (usually with strange results!)

This idea isn't new. I used something just like this (but more ghetto) whenever I worked on Firefox extensions. It was called the Extension Developer Extension:

http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/extensiondev/

It had other features, but the REPL was the most important to me. This looks much nicer though.

> This idea isn't new

In fact I would say it's a kind of a pattern: implementing REPLs for systems that weren't made with REPLs in mind.

(That doesn't say anything about the coolness of this hack though, one way or the other :)

That's not the same. MozRepl let's you execute JavaScript from, say, a terminal through a socket connection.

I'm pretty sure ChromeBug (http://getfirebug.com/releases/#chromebug) lets you do this, though it has some trade-offs.

On one hand, it's built on top of Firebug; this adds a lot of power (chrome inspection, javascript debugging/breakpoints in the chrome).

On the other, it's alpha, and not the focus of development (as far as I can tell)--it hasn't had a new release in some time.

http://www.croczilla.com/bits_and_pieces/jssh/

Edit: Just realised that this is pure javascript, making it a lot easier to deploy than jssh, and also a lot more extensible. That is awesome.

Any way to save changes to the browser?

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