~robcee/ more than just sandwiches

Scratchpad (née Workspace), Web Developer Menu landed

First of all, I feel obliged to ask you to use Aurora. It’s pretty. It has a nice icon. You’ll enjoy the early glimpse of features and smooth visuals. You can get it here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/channel/.

With that out of the way, I can talk about the landing of Scratchpad (formerly Workspace) into mozilla-central. It landed yesterday and you can find it in today’s Nightly under the Web Developer menu. There’s also a new submenu in Tools if you’re on a Mac or running Windows with the menubar shown. We’ve moved Page Source there as well to be consistent with the App Menu’s contents.

You can also open the Scratchpad with the F4 key for rapid access.

If you’re an extension or browser developer, you’ll want to open about:config and change devtools.chrome.enabled to true. This adds a Chrome item to the Context menu for Scratchpad. As the menu might suggest, it changes your default JavaScript context to be the browser’s chrome space.

This is brand new stuff. Mihai Sucan did a great job of converting our add-on prototype to a browser feature, but there might still be some rough edges. Please file bugs under Firefox::Devtools in bugzilla.

And then there’s the outstanding stuff we have left to do. High on that list is some actual documentation and a screencast to show how it can be used. You can and should pester me to do this. I’m hoping to do a little screencasting sometime later this week.

I’m a little surprised at the lack of any visible buttons on the window – it doesn’t feel like good usability (especially on Mac) for the only way to use a function being a context menu item. Are there any plans to make its use a little more obvious?

Not presently. The idea is to be quick and uncluttered. You’ll note that the various Inspect, Execute and Print functions all have hotkeys associated with them.

I don’t get the purpose of this tool. What can it do that the Web Console cannot?

@Anthony From what I can tell, this gives you any easy way to test out javascript snippets with chrome privileges. If you’re an extension developer this an save you having to restart the browser so often.

Not just chrome, any JavaScript.

I hope my oft-promised screencast can make it a little clearer. Stay tuned!

Hi Robcee,

I like David’s idea. You can add a button and keep it in Customize Toolbar window. Users who needs it will take it from there and place it where they like. In this way you can make sure it is uncluttered. Am I sensible?

@girish It’s pretty sensible, although there’s some extra code involved to make it happen. If we include graphical toolbar buttons, we have to have graphics — how do I represent “Execute” or “Print” in this context in a way that’s universally understandable? We need an extra View menu with show/hide toolbar code…

Anyway, it’s not an unreasonable request. Filed bug 656273. Thanks for the comments Girish and David!

great work!
what would you say are the advantages compared to the expanded (multiline) command line in firebug?

I would say these are the advantages over the command-line in the console and the multiline command line in Firebug:

I think the Scratchpad is sufficiently different from various console-based command-lines that it’s a different beast altogether. Try it!

I’m running aurora in OS X and I cannot find where the #$^%^ this scratchpad thing is.

seems the Web Developer Toolbar’s Web Developer Menu Item is having a negative interaction with the new built in Web Developer Menu Item.

oh… that’s unfortunate.

We’ll have to contact the author and see if we can get them to fit their menu in there.