Firefox: –new-tab or no –new-tab

When using firefox to repeatedly open similar URLs from the command line or from Emacs (for e.g., searching Wikipedia or Wiktionary), you have 3 choices:

  1. Open in a new window (yak, who would want many windows)
  2. Open in a new tab
  3. Open in the current tab

Option 1 doesn't count at least for me, so I'm facing the latter 2. Belindly choosing either of them is equally undesirable. With 2, I could end up with lot of tabs most of which not wanted anymore; With 3, well I could accidentally "overload" an important on-line form that I'm halfway filling.

So I've been thinking a smarter way to open these kind of URLs: before openning, should be able to check what the current tab is already visiting, if the url seems the same as my intention (for e.g., search Wikipedia), then go ahead with the current tab; if not, then open a new tab.

With a script named get-firefox-tab-url, I could write my search-wikipedia script like this: 

entry=$1
url="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=$entry"
tab_mode=-new-tab
if [[ $(get-firefox-tab-url) =~ ://en.wikipedia.org/ ]]; then
   tab_mode=
fi

firefox $tab_mode "$url"

So, to the script get-firefox-tab-url. Firefor doesn't provide this kind of IPC out of the box, so I must use the IPC mechanisms provided by the system: clipboard. Like this:

  1. Clear the clipboard
  2. Find the firefox window and send it 2 keys: C-l to focus into the url bar, and C-c to put the url into clipboard
  3. Print the clipboard

For step 2, I use sawfish so it's not a problem. If you are not a sawfish user, then maybe you can check xdotool.

The whole script: 

#!/bin/bash
putclip ""

script=$(cat <<EOF
(catch 'TAG
 (mapc
   (lambda (w)
     (when (string-match "- Mozilla Firefox\$" (window-name w))
       (synthesize-event "C-l" w)
       (synthesize-event "C-c" w)
       (throw 'TAG)))
   (managed-windows)))
EOF
)
sawfish-client -e "$script" >~/.logs/$(basename $0).log 2>&1

getclip

Here putclip and getclip are both my wrappers around xclip.

Oh, almost forgot: by default, firefox URL and firefox --new-tab URL behave the same: both will open URL in a new tab. To make the former open URL in the current tab, goto about:config and toggle browser.link.open_newwindow.override.external to 1.