Open Page Source Code in External Viewer in Firefox

Jan 3, 2009|How to/tutorials | 5 Comments »

If you are a web developer or a designer, you might want to know the source code of a page you are viewing. We use “View Source” function in any browser for this purpose. Generally it opens up an internal viewer of browser. Instead it is very much convenient if code is displayed directly in our favourite viewer like Dreamweaver or Notepad++.

This simple trick will let you do this in Firefox. Read on find it out.

Type “about:config” in address bar without quotes and press Enter.
Click ‘I’ll be careful, i promise!‘ button. You’ll be in a place with lot of configuration options.
There in Filter text box, type “view_source.*” without quotes and press Enter.
Look for “view_source.editor.external” entry there and double click on it to toggle its value to True.
Now, double click “view_source.editor.path” entry. The ‘Enter String Value’ dialog box will open.
Set its value to path of the external viewer you want to use and click OK. For example i entered the path C:\Program Files\Notepad++\Notepad++.exe as i want to use Notepad++ as an external viewer.
There you have it. You should now be able to view source code of a page in your favorite viewer. If you later uninstall that viewer or change some settings, the internal viewer will be used.

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5 Comments as of now »

Nihar said,

January 4, 2009 @ 8:44 pm

Thanks for the wonderful tip. I would love to see the page source in some editor that supports syntax highlighting.
Nicholas Francis said,

January 4, 2009 @ 11:28 pm

@ nihar Thanks for dropping by, pls do visit again for more such wonderful post.. Glad that it was useful for you!!
SteveYu said,

February 1, 2009 @ 3:58 am

Cool trick. Wow, your blog is full with many informative content.
Nicholas Francis said,

February 1, 2009 @ 9:42 am

Thanks Steve, for dropping by and also for the complement. keep visiting. Your blog rocks too!
Daevid Vincent said,

February 19, 2009 @ 4:40 pm

Is there a way to trigger the “View Page Source” via Javascript? I'd love to have it trigger that automatically for me instead of always having to type “CTRL+U” all the time while building/debugging my page.