Userscripts, reloaded.
Remoded was originaly conceived sometime before Christmas 2011, but it never really got beyond the idea stage. A little later, I had a look at dotjs, bringing in a refreshing thought of simplicity over the initially complex thing I had in mind. Months passed, and finally remoded was born.
I recently wrote a bit about Userscripts and my impression of the community behind them, at least while I was coding a lot in there. I complained about the apparent animosity expressed towards « noobs » who wanted to use jQuery instead of just pure DOM and Javascript.
Userscripts are somewhere between apps and websites and bookmarklets. They have context, as in, they run on the web, on top of something that exists; they can be distributed, made by developers and used by people*; they are varied... from minor tweaks to completely new UIs. When remaking them, then, one needs to consider all of these. It's not easy.
* Not that developers aren't people. Although that's debatable.
I mean, does anyone on the web does any serious work all in one file? OK, there's a few, but generally development is done with a variety of files. You might be used to concatenating everything in one file for production, but the reason for that is about network latency — a problem that isn't one if all your files are local. Plus, requiring that all code be in one file means you can't use frameworks like jQuery UI or Pinot, nor many different libraries or plugins, nor images, nor flash if that's your fancy, nor appCache, nor...
A Remoded userscript takes the shape of a single directory in ~/.remoded. The
naming goes like this:
examplescriptname # That's just a generic thing
example@author # The code was pulled from @author's GitHub 'example' repo
gist-12345@author # The code was pulled from @author's Gist 12345
# Currently, the last two are just a convention, but later on... :)
Of course, the userscript isn't run all the time, on every webpage... that's were
the Manifest comes in. In the userscript directory, the only required file is a
Manifest. This file offers all the flexibility you want with zero effort. In its
simplest form, it goes like this:
load "script.js"
All this does is load the file script.js into all pages. You can load as many
files as you want, in the order you specify:
load "lib/jquery.js", "lib/underscore.js"
load [
"lib/underscore.string.js"
"script.js"
]
Not only JavaScript, you can load in CSS, and arbitrary text files:
load "stylesheets/style.css"
load "locale/jp_JP.yml"
But what if we only want to run on a subset of pages?
match "foo/bar" # Exact matching (+/- trailing slash)
match "*.php" # Wildcard matching (Not implemented)
match /^bar\/?.*(?!\.s?html?)$/ # Regexp
# Also, domains:
domain "example.com"
domain /^(b|a|z)\.example.+$/
# Ports are thrown in for free
port 8080
port "1200..1234" # Ranges! (Not implemented)
port /^[1-9]+000$/ # Regexp! (Not implemented)
What about conditional loading? Well, there's better: scopes.
scope ->
match "only/this/page"
domain "on.this.websi.te"
load "special.js"
The Manifest is actually a CoffeeScript DSL, so you can use functions, variables, and the full power of the language to achieve exactly what you want.
Todo: implement all that "Not implemented" stuff |-;
Copyright 2012 © Félix Saparelli [:passcod]
Licensed under MIT.
Thanks: @defunkt, @rlr, @greasemonkey, @scriptish