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Peter's Script-Archive - some scripts for Firefox

Some firefox command line support scripts addressing usage deficiencies of firefox. Usable to e.g. load all bookmarks from a number of bookmarkfolders (have firefox or firefoxstdin invoke firefoxgrep...) . In a pinch, the scripts below also offer a low level method to diff/copy a few changed bookmarks.

As I'm using the command line rather than just mouse & GUI, these scripts are life-safers and necessary to make firefox properly usable for me at a mere 'works-for-me' level. As such, this set of scripts is more of a raw concept example for firefox shell integration rather than a proper finished releasable script. That said, if you've a shell related firefox pet-peave, I'll gladly have a look at it :).

See also: For a better generic approach to control firefox, consider e.g. perl-javascript bridging code like the Perl Interface to MozRepl (MozRepl itself), Corion's recent WWW::Mechanize::Firefox (should allow hacking a javascript-conscious wget-clone), or e.g. Selenium.

To use a tk-style approach to build a javascript-DOM-style user interface for a server script, consider e.g. XUL::Node.

Note that the firefox wrapper should be rewritten in perl with firefoxstdin folded into the code. Currently the two scripts call each other for a number of functions... . But that's what you get with works-for-me examples :).

Some remarks:

• X11 and pixmap caching: Looks like export MOZ_DISABLE_IMAGE_OPTIMIZE=1 is still required to avoid firefox placing pixmaps into an ever growing X11 when e.g. using multiple tabs and autopager.
• sqlite3 FILE.SQLIST vacuum can be used to clean a sqlite file when firefox is not running.
• a cheap trick to get sqlite content (read-only): ask the user to leave the browser idle for a few seconds, then just cp the sqlite file of interest. The data should have been flushed to disk, and copying will break locks and make the contents accessible again. See e.g. firefoxgrep*sqlite in this section.
• userChrome.css contains a collection of settings to somewhat reduce the wasted screen real estate. To further reduce wastage, hide navbar and bookmark bar and configure the menubar to show the url field and forward/back/stop/reload (small-icons/no-text). With above Chrome settings, even microfox(sp?) isn't able to reclaim much more space :). I've placed the file into this section.
• My required minimum of addons to get along with firefox:
  • System: Addblock Plus, Add N Edit Cookies (if necessary modify the jar and edit the version number to allow installation; I've yet to see a worthwile substitute), Noscript, Secure Login, User Agent Switcher, ModifyHeaders, JSView.
  • Usability: AOIS Sidebar, Tabkit (replaced tabmixplus; one pet-peeve: opening a bookmark folder from the menu also replaces the current tab)
  • Usability 2: AutoPager.
  • Usability & nice to have: SplitBrowser, ResurrectPage, GreaseMonkey
  • Information Overload: NewsFox (though firefoxgrep goes a long way to deal with periodic weekly or monthly site visits: create a folder like watch/news.weekly, and ask the wrapper with 'firefox -weekly' to grep for urls and folders ending in weekly. Alternatively, just open each '*.weekly' folder from the bookmarks menu, selecting open all)
  • Information Overload & nice to have: Zotero's local data store's actually quite accessible using a little bit of sql/sqlite. So that's another nice tool, and it is possible to extract things from Zotero using the command line.
  • xul/migemo would be very nice as well if it wouldn't crash on me as soon as I try to search using regular expressiones.

Commands

Git View of this section / Download

• firefox is a rather ugly script with grown warts; actually nowadays, firefox 3.5 finally implements some of the features I'm using this wrapper for. Note that to directly load a set of urls from a file firefox.-NAME, you need to add -NAME to the list of shortcuts in the script. If the file for the shortcut doesn't exist, firefoxstdin is invoked instead with this option.
• firefoxcookies dumps cookies.sqlite.
• firefoxdelta is a helper to show differences in bookmarks.
• firefoxgrep* greps both html and sqlite bookmarks.
• firefoxstdin: given urls or grep commands on stdin, get the urls, repair them (e.g. urls pasted from email) and use the firefox wrapper to open them in the running firefox instance. Some shortcuts like -weekly are defined, which is translated to the input line "GREP 'weekly ::'", which is expanded to the output of a firefoxgrep for all bookmarks ending with weekly or being in folders ending with the string weekly. This implements a way to open a number of folders straight from the command line.
• firefoxsessionlist dumps xml-ish files like the firefox sessionstore in a number of representations, with some grepping added.

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jakobi(at)acm.org, 2009-07 - 2012-03