Is it possible to have tab completion of drop-down lists in web pages in Firefox?

Question

Does anyone know of a Firefox plugin that would enable tab-completion (or some other key sequence like Alt-L) of items in drop-down lists in web forms?

e.g.

ou<TAB>in<TAB>s<TAB>

for 'OurCompany - Internal Support'

Vimperator's hints mode makes it very ergonomic to focus the drop-down list with a key sequence like

f13

but the keyboard interface to the drop-down list still sucks. I very frequently have to pick items from a very long list with very long common prefixes among the entries (e.g. 30-40 starting with OurCompany -), which renders both the built-in keyboard interface and the mouse pretty slow and unergonomic.

I basically want readline support for filling webforms!

Answer 1

Well there's no Firefox pluging doing this stuff for you but you can do it using UserScript, with Greasemonkey or Some other Userscript Interpretor.

A user script is a piece of JavaScript code executed on a defined by user , web page, aiming to improve User's experience on the particular Web Page.

If you are familiar with JavaScript and jQuery Your workround is this. You will create a userscript that will include to every single page the latest jQuery Library. Then you will get all Document's Select Controls with

$("select").each(function (index,element) {});

and you will hide them and replacing them with a user Input

Something Like this (Not Tested)

$("select").each(function (index,element) { var newControl=$("<input id='uniqueid' type='text'/>").insertBefore($(element)); newControl.attr("class",$(element).attr("class")); $(element).css("display","none"); });

and in this code you will have to create your hooks to the controls.

Read More about UserScripts Here