Contents

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PsycZilla Documentation

You can find more general information in the main PsycZilla article.

This page will serve as a collection of barely-organized documentation for the PsycZilla project and related technologies.

For now there virtually is no documentation. See "Availability" for a few notes on installing if you are brave enough and you want to try it out.

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Getting Started

Once installed, go to the Extensions and open up the Preferences for PsycZilla. You will need to input your PSYC UNI. You get that by logging into any psyced, then type /x. You can specify your password, or have the client ask you for it later.

If you have no PSYC identity yet, insert a username of your choice and a server from the list of Public Servers. The server will let you in, if the name isn't registered by anyone else already. Next you can specify a password using the /register command. Sorry, we haven't made a pop-up for registration yet.

As soon as this is done you can start things by selecting Open PsycZilla (from the tools menu) or the way I prefer it: By clicking on a psyc://psyced.org/@psyc uniform. There is also a PsycZilla toolbar button that you can place on the toolbar of your choice by using the Customize Toolbars interface in Firefox.

You may find some helpful information in the Documentation or by asking on the PSYC Developers Chatroom

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Hotkeys / Commands / Shortcuts

Shortcut keys have been updated in v0.4. It's still a work in progress!
  • While chatting, the following keys have special actions:
    • Enter: Sends current command or message
    • Shift+Enter: Adds a new line to your message without sending
    • Enter: (when input is blank) clears the chat history in the current tab (This feature can be disabled in preferences)
    • Escape: Clears the text input field
    • The following Common/Standard shortcut keys are supported:
      • ctrl-l: This also clears the chat history of the current tab.
      • ctrl-w: Careful! Closes the currently selected tab
      • ctrl-z: Undo editing in the text input field. Also helpful to restore text if you hit escape by mistake!
      • ctrl-c/ctrl-v: copy/paste
      • ctrl-a: Selects all text. This command should work with the input text field and the chat history display. To select-all in your chat history, first press tab to move the "input focus" off of the input field and then type ctrl-a.
      • Up and Down arrow keys: Navigate input history list. This is somewhat like the command history in bash shell.
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Notes

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Text selection

There is a minor bug with selecting text in the chat history. For some unknown reason it is difficult to drag a text selection over multiple lines of text. If you need to copy multiple lines of text from a chat window use one of the following tips to work around the bug:
  • ctrl-a (command-a on Apple systems) - as mentioned above, when you use the tab key to move input focus off of the text input field you can then type ctrl-a to select all of the text in the current chat history view. Follow with ctrl-c to copy the text to your clipboard. If you don't want to copy everything in the chat log then you can try the second method below.
  • shift-click - Start by selecting the first line of text, beginning at the top of the section that you would like to copy (click + drag to select it, hopefully you knew this already!) - once that first line is selected you can simply hold the shift key on your keyboard and then click the mouse at the end of your desired selection area. The initial selection is expanded to include everything up to the point where you "shift-click."
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Firefox 2

Sadly, PsycZilla does not currently work with Firefox 2.0. We are working on a solution, however, we are not yet able to determine the cause of the incompatibility. You can read the blog entry for more details.

Update: The latest CVS version should be working.
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See also

See PsycZilla:ToDo for information about known bugs and other issues that we are aware of.

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Developer Docs / Notes

This section will collect Coding tips, short cuts, code samples and Mozilla/PSYC related links that developers might find useful.

  • Disable XUL Cache - This setting will allow you to test code changes without restarting the application, use about:config to change the value of nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache to true. There are other preference changes that help with development, as documented in this article
<lynX> I didn't find the entry in [about:config] but it was trivial to edit prefs.js manually while the browser is down.
<monkey> Some prefs do not have a default, however, about:config will let you add values as well. But there is nothing wrong with editing prefs.js either!