Show HN: HTML-Notepad – A WYSIWYG editor of structured documents
html-notepad.com
html-notepad.com
Some feature suggestions that come on my mind: add support to host images on imgur and alternatives, add a button export + run a python script to post-process (so people would be able to use a script to publish posts directly from the editor), add a tree layout panel to navigate between headings quickly, add support for manual Markdown code editing with back-parsing after manual code modification.
Thanks!
Basic idea is that HTML is so called "master format" - you edit mostly in WYSIWYG and getting MD or reStructuredText (of particular flavor) when you need to publish it.
Next step in MD support will be MD-to-HTML converter so you can copy MD from, say, GitHub, edit it in human readable form and publish it back.
As of pre blocks syntax highlighting... This is also planed. Sciter already has native support for it, here is full source of script colorizing: https://sciter.com/tokenizer-mark-syntax-colorizer/ , thus it will not be difficult to do that.
I hope the experience improves because I'd like to do my documentation in something better than text, but don't want to hand edit crap and every other tool I've tried produces inconsistent results.
"Save as" is there but no button for it yet, will add.
HTML-NOTEPAD is at beta stage at the moment, so bug reports are always welcome. And my pardons in advance for any of them.
Due to moving from one macbook pro to another, my current user folder name has a space in its name, which macos itself selected as the name of the folder. This seems to prevent your app from saving any files.
That would be great if it supported 'library' blocks of HTML, then you could later edit the library definition and all the related pages would update, in effect doing a Find and Replace for a text block of code within all the HTML files in a folder.
Widget here is a class of custom DOM elements that knows how to represent itself by HTML means. Such classes constitute that 'library' of yours, AFAIU. When you load document containing such widget, the class instantiated and it can check HTML structure it gets assigned to and morph content if needed. So it is a matter of loading/saving the document to get updated structure.
No, this thing is quite opposite to notepad.exe
"Notepad" in its name is more about size, launch speed and simplicity (the property that I would like to keep as much as I can). If it will go well it is going to be "Pro" version with all needed bells and whistles.
But when you need to provide tabular data (statistic results for example) ... and by people of Excel age ... challenging at least.
Support of various half-backed markups/markdowns is one of design goals.
5% of population is capable to be leaders - to manage people and businesses . There are 7% of people who have abstract minds to do science. We are not equal in this respect. At the same time that absolutely does not mean that we are bad or "second tier" people. Each of us has its perfect "half" that we love. Even more - love is not possible between twos who have absolutely similar characters and skills.
I was born in USSR so quite familiar with enforced equality.
And back to subject: being an author of HTML/CSS engine I am quite familiar with HTML/CSS. Yet did couple of Markdown-to-HTML parsers. So I know all this stuff from inside out. But still I cannot convince myself of typing structured texts using monospace fonts of plain text editors. That's inhumane at least. Proportional fonts are there on purpose.
Why, the heck, I or she shall use those "poor man WYSIWYGs" (Markdown & friends) in 21st century when robots are landing on asteroids and other planets?
If you meant it as a joke I don't actually mind that much, y'all are married, but it's when you're serious about it that people are going to call it out.
The application size is awesome!
Sadly, this doesn't seem to be it... the UI is very clunky with weird glitches (e.g. right click on the titlebar doesn't show a menu and instead has some line appear), half of it uses subpixel antialiasing and half of it doesnt and doesn't follow any Windows desktop application conventions (no menu bar - yes i know some other programs do the same, i don't like them either) nor has any sort of way to customize the UI (like hiding the sidebar at the right or the gap with the ugly rectangles at the left that i'm not sure about - guess where a menu bar with a View menu would help :-P). Also some editing operations feel a bit off. I think it would improve massively with a native UI based on wxWidgets (or Qt, but Qt is more of an imitation of native widgets than the real deal) and using the HTML engine only in the editing area.
But FWIW what i like is
A) The idea - big props on that because i really want something like this but couldn't find anything that wasn't an absolute disgrace compared to Frontpage Express (e.g. i made this [4] vs [5] a couple of years ago - i exaggerate a little, but only a little :-P). I tried to make something similar, but made it overcomplicated and lost interest. Perhaps i'll try again at some point - after all i don't need all modern Web 3.1 features, just a tiny bit more than what Frontpage Express provides.
B) Pasting an image from clipboard actually works. I'm 60% over liking that it makes the image part of the HTML file as embedded data and 40% over not liking it because it bloats the HTML file unnecessarily... but i think that it is more convenient this way (and you can drop the html file to something like mixtape.moe which allows sharing raw html files).
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/
[1] http://runtimeterror.com/tools/liteproc/
[2] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/
[3] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/webserver/
First of all, FrontPage is a web-page-editor and html-notepad is not. It means that html-notepad can be used to edit textual content/fragments of web pages, but not the whole page. That's simply impossible. And that's why web-page-editors, as a class, have gone all together. "Sic transit gloria mundi" to them.
The only reasonable way of composing pages by pure WYSIWYG means are wizards or page-blocks-composers - something close to mechanism that WordPress is using.
"the gap with the ugly rectangles at the left that i'm not sure about"
Those rectangles play several roles:
a) to visualize hierarchical structure. This helps a lot. At least to predict what hit on ENTER will do.
b) they allow to select elements as a whole. In browsers with that "contenteditable" rudimental thing you cannot select whole element:
<p>|Foo bar|</p>
|<p>Foo bar</p>|
c) they will serve role of drag handles to be able to reorganize structure interactively.
As of UI configurability... it will be there.
As of wxWidgets, etc. - I see no reason for that. Neither of popular editors use standard (quite limited) OS widget sets. MS Office, Adobe, Sublime and so on as examples.
People generally don't want to use different editors for different types of files.
I mean, I too want to use a single text editor, but I’m not sure that people generally feel the same way.
When developing applications with multiple different types of files (XML, HTML, JSON, Javascript, etc)
A) They prefer to use different editors for each of type of file.
B) They prefer to use a single editor that supports all the formats.
A) Text editors don't typically support multiple different file formats.
B) Text editors typically support multiple different file formats.Appears as you are waiting for silver bullet to be invented …
What about, say, Inkscape (SVG WYSIWYG editor)? Do you expect it to appear as integral part of your IDE? What kind of IDE it will be then?