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Cannot edit source after selecting View | Source (Cntl-U)

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  • Last reply by TonyE

mozman
mozman

After installing Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13, I cannot edit source text when I select "View" | "Source" (Cntl-U).

I can see the source, but I can't modify it. I believe I used to be able to do this on my prior Firefox release (can't remember exactly what the release number was, but it wasn't more than a couple years old.)

After installing Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13, I cannot edit source text when I select "View" | "Source" (Cntl-U). I can see the source, but I can't modify it. I believe I used to be able to do this on my prior Firefox release (can't remember exactly what the release number was, but it wasn't more than a couple years old.)

All Replies (1)

TonyE
TonyE

The built in option is a source viewer, not an editor. You can change this to use an external application.

You can do this by changing 2 hidden preferences.

  1. Type about:config into the location bar and press enter
  2. Accept the warning message that appears, you will be taken to a list of preferences
  3. In the filter box type view_source
  4. Double-click on view_source.editor.external to change its value to true
  5. Double-click on view_source.editor.path and set it to the path of the external editor that you want to use.

As an example, I use Notepad++ to as the source editor (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/), so I have set view_source.editor.path to C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe

You can use the Dafizilla ViewSourceWith add-on to select an external editor to view the source- https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/dafizilla-viewsourcewith/