Firefox External Tools

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Some applications, especially editors and IDEs, allow you to add custom commands that will run an external application with the current document (or selection, folder, etc) as an argument. Also, file managers like Nautilus allow you to run arbitrary scripts against currently selected files.

Seeing many Firefox extensions I was thinking that it would be great to have something like this in Firefox. For example, there are many command line YouTube movie downloaders. A Firefox External Tools extensions would allow you to hook this script right into the browser.

When adding custom commands ideally you can configure when, where and how are these commands invoked.

  1. When - filters to define when is a specific command available (or visible), based on URL, MIME type, Encoding (pretty much any of the parameters listed on Page Info / General).
  2. Where does the command show up - menu entry under Tools, page context menu, link context menu, toolbar button and also associated label, icon and shortcut.
  3. How is the command invoked - command path, working folder, command arguments.

I was pretty sure that something like this was created long ago, but I could not find anything like it.

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