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Have any of the heavy users put together an emacs or conkeror Stack Overflow mode that they'd wish to share? It'd be REALLY nice to compose posts and replies in a text editor rather than switching to the browser. Pages could load in the background while you get coding done, etc.

In terms of implementation — I took a look at how Stack Overflow renders in lynx and emacs-w3m, and most of the functionality is there (except for a few AJAXY things like upvote). So this should be very possible.

Alternatively, does anyone have any conkeror customizations to share? This might be the most unappreciated tool out there for the emacs aficionado. It's basically Firefox with Emacs keybindings, customized in .js files rather than .el files.


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Uh, I always compose my posts in emacs. In conkeror, hit C-i, and emacs opens up with the contents of the text field. –  jrockway Apr 19 '09 at 17:14
Ah. nice. I'll try that out. Btw, do you want to share any other Conkeror tips specifically? Started a thread on that topic. I'm amazed that there wasn't a stack overflow tag for it till I made one...it's really undermarketed. stackoverflow.com/questions/768263/… –  ramanujan Apr 20 '09 at 13:32

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up vote 6 down vote accepted

Not exactly what you're looking for but check out the It's All Text! Firefox extension. Lets you edit text in your editor of choice as an alternative to editing in the browser.


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Brilliant! Thanks –  Andy Apr 19 '09 at 10:26
I actually do use this already, but I couldn't get it to launch 'emacs -nw', so I'm just having it use TextEdit. It also breaks flow a bit. But it's definitely better than the standard SO keybindings... –  ramanujan Apr 20 '09 at 13:20
@ramanujan emacs -nw will launch without using a window system; it is usually used for starting an emacs session in an xterm window. The way I do it is by having server-mode running in my main emacs instance and having emacsclient as the It's All Text! editor. –  haxney Dec 15 '11 at 7:43

I've actually have just written a StackOverflow mode for Conkeror. It only allows for voting on questions at the moment. If you run conkeror from git you should just be able to pull and get it if you don't already have it. It should work on any StackExchange site but it is only loaded by default on Meta, StackOverflow, SuperUser, and ServerFault.

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