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Contributing to Firenvim

Thanks a lot for thinking about contributing to Firenvim! Please do not hesitate to ask me questions, either by opening github issues, joining the matrix chat room or by sending me emails (you can find my email by running git log in the git repository).

Building Firenvim

Using Docker

Installing from source using docker requires docker 18.09 or higher for BuildKit support. Older Docker versions will build the required files into the image, but will not copy them into the host.

git clone https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim
cd firenvim
DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build . -t firenvim --output target

Without Docker

Building without Docker requires NodeJS, npm, and Neovim >= 0.4.

Install Firenvim like a regular vim plugin (either by changing your runtime path manually or by using your favourite plugin manager).

Then run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim
cd firenvim
npm install
npm run build
npm run install_manifests

These commands should create three directories: target/chrome, target/firefox and target/xpi.

Installing the addon

Google Chrome/Chromium

Go to chrome://extensions, enable "Developer mode", click on Load unpacked and select the target/chrome directory.

Firefox

There are multiple ways to install add-ons from files on Firefox. If you just want to use Firenvim, use the regular mode. If you want to test, debug and frequently change Firenvim's source code, use the dev mode.

To install Firenvim in regular mode, go to about:addons, click on the cog icon, select install addon from file and select target/xpi/firenvim-XXX.zip (note: this might require setting xpinstall.signatures.required to false in about:config).

To install Firenvim in dev mode, go to about:debugging, click "Load Temporary Add-On" and select target/firefox/manifest.json.

Working on Firenvim

npm run build is slow and performs lots of checks. In order to iterate faster, you can use "$(npm bin)/webpack --env=firefox" or "$(npm bin)/webpack" --env=chrome to build only for the target you care about. Make sure you click the "reload" button in your browser every time you reload Firenvim.

Firenvim's architecture is briefly described in SECURITY.md. Firenvim is a webextension (it is a good idea to keep the webextension documentation at hand if you're not familiar with webextension development). Webextensions are split in multiple processes. These processes communicate by sending messages to each other and have different entry points. Firenvim's entry points are:

  • src/background.ts: Entry point of the background process.
  • src/content.ts: Entry point of the content process (firefox & chrome only).
  • src/frame.ts: Entry point of the Neovim Frame process.
  • src/browserAction.ts: Entry point of the browser action process.

Background process

The background process is started on browser startup and takes care of several tasks:

  • Starting the Neovim server and loading the settings from your init.vim.
  • Handling browser shortcuts such as <C-w>, <C-n> or <C-t> that cannot be overridden by the Neovim Frame process.
  • Logging errors and sending them to the browserAction.
  • Forwarding messages from the Neovim Frame process to the content process and vice versa.

Content

A Content process is created for each new tab. The tasks it performs are:

  • Creating event listeners to detect when the user tries to interact with a "writable" element to then spawn a Neovim Frame process.
  • Retrieving the content of said element and sending it to the Neovim Frame process.
  • Detecting when the "writable" element disappears or is resized, to hide or resize the Neovim Frame.
  • Writing the content of the Neovim Frame back to the "writable" element.

Reading and writing the content of "writable" elements requires interacting with different kinds of editors (CodeMirror, Ace, Monaco, Textareas, contenteditable...). This is handled by the editor-adapter library I created.

Neovim Frame process

Neovim Frame process are created for each "writable" element the user wants to interact with. The role of the Neovim Frame process is to connect to the Neovim server started by the background process. This is done with a websocket. Once the connection has been made, the Neovim Frame process forwards keypresses to the Neovim server and displays the resulting screen updates. Handling keypresses is performed in src/input.ts by relying on the KeyHandler instantiated in src/frame.ts. Updating the screen is performed by src/renderer.ts. The Neovim Frame process creates a BufWrite autocommand to detect when the buffer is written to the disk. When this happens, it sends a request to the Content process and asks it to update the content of the "writable" element.

Browser Action process

The browser action process corresponds to the small Firenvim button next to the URL bar. It is created every time the user clicks on the button. It displays errors, warnings and lets the background script know when users click on the button to reload their configuration or to disable firenvim in the current tab.

Testing your changes

The CI tests changes automatically, so running tests on your machine is not required. If you do want to test Firenvim on your machine, you will need to install either Geckodriver (firefox) or Chromedriver (Chrome & Chromium). Once that is done, run npm run test-firefox or npm run test-chrome. This will build the add-on in testing mode, load it in a browser and run a few tests to make sure nothing is particularly broken.

Writing new tests is currently rather complicated, so feel free to let me handle that if you don't want to deal with it.