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Hi guys,
we are planning to add more support features for writing normal text documents such as blog posts, manuals, etc. using markup languages like textile, markdown, rest, etc. Word-wrap is one of the first features to support this. However, more is to come. My questions:
Thanx for your answers in advance
I do quite like darkroom, but I can’t say I use it that much, honestly. I think that’s mostly because I do much more coding than ‘writing’, not a critisism of darkroom itself though.
I think that some kind of full screen mode would fit quite nicely with intypes minimalist aesthetic – and a simple version would probably be fairly simple to implement. I wouldn’t go overboard to out dark dark room though – I’m not sure enough people would find it useful enough to justify the effort.
Maybe just F11 to maximize the window and hide all the UI, except (maybe optionally) scrollbars and/or tabs and/or the status bar?
martincohen:
we are planning to add more support features for writing normal text documents such as blog posts, manuals, etc. using markup languages like textile, markdown, rest, etc. Word-wrap is one of the first features to support this. However, more is to come.
Everyone I know who writes blogs, is using the web interface.
martincohen:
- Do you think it will be handy for you?
Not really. I don’t use textile or wiki like languages. Most developers I know (about simple users not to mention) think that it’s totally sick, and don’t understand how can it be that is so spreaded these days (a WYSIWYG is so much simpler). For technical manuals, DocBook is the king (and there are very good tools for it – so no hand coding). For the rest of manual or book writers, MS (or Open) Office is just perfect (you can’t beat the specialized spelling checkers aviliable for various languages as office plug-ins).
martincohen:
- What features would you like to have for writing such documents?
Just speed. This is the only reason for InType: to be able to do something small extremly fast. For everything else there are very productive and specialized tools that have tones of features can’t be achieved with a simple text editor (and I think one should not even try to).
martincohen:
- What do you think about Dark Room, is this one of the ways of writing you would welcome in Intype?
If it could be white than cool, so “White room” yes.
OT:
I know that InType is a text editor not an IDE, but I think it would make sense to take a look at IntelliJ IDEA
(It’s the most intelligent IDE out there and the best coding experience, so some ideas from there might be worth).
E.g. One feature that is extremly interesting and the equivalent of “macros/snippets” is called there
live templates
The cool about the IntelliJ version is that it’s “intelligent”, i.e. when calling “itli”(iterate list) it will offer for selection only the list objects in the context of the caret and generate an interation. This is much more efficient than any other macro/snippet solution other tools offer.
Another one: Surrounding with … is able to surround a token or selection with something in an intelligent way, i.e. only what makes sense for correct code. E.g. if sourund with try/catch is called than the only the exceptions in catch are generated that in the surrounded code can be thrown.
I know, many of those features can’t be implemented with a text editor becase of the IDE is using an AST, but it might help making some features to work “smarter”.
Thank you,
Demetrios.
if im writing a document i will use a software that has all the tools for that task (MS Word). but if im writing a note or something that does not require design i will use notepad.
a fullscreen mode sounds good.
It definitely will be handy for me. I don’t like WYSIWYG editors for text editing, markup languages are (imho) perfect for this. Anyway, i really dunno what features to add :) Maybe indent-dependent background-coloring would be usefull for writing manuals and so. And maybe more keyboard features for text navigation (Vim is still the best solution for text editing though).
Some weeks ago I tried to use markdown to write some specs for a project. The problem is :“it wasn’t really readable.. and most importantly, not fun at all to read”. But if there could some kind of on-the-fly css styling.. or rtf-export/preview.. I don’t know, just an idea.
Regarding Darkroom, full screen support with adjustable opacity would be pretty cool : )
screenshot
That’s a good point really – for anything web based, like a wiki, blog or forum, everyone just uses the web based editor/wisywig/textbox whatever, rather than an external editor.
Yeah, I’m using web-based editors (textareas usually, not the WYSIWYG components). However, we are planning adding HTTP and XML support to JS, so you will be able to use XML/RPC from within the Intype. Therefore I want to focus on the writing as soon as possible. So could we just forget how many users are using wysiwyg or ms word and focus on “what if I want to write documents in Intype”. :)
Apart from the obvious things that ‘writers’ always want in software (spell check & word count – both of which would probably be add-on/plugins or whatever) – I’m not really a writer, so I’m probably not qualified to comment too much.
Having said that, I tend to edit my prose quite a lot after it’s first written – rearranging things and re-wording stuff. Intype’s fab ctrl+shift up/down arrow feature is great for this (and I now really miss it when using other editors) – a drag and drop equivalent would be nice for moving large blocks of text around.
Anyway, plugin simulating Vi keybindings and basic modes would be very cool.
@DrCurl:
Spellchecking as a feature accessible by every application is already available (even for windows) via gnuspell. Gaim/pidgin and other app use it (but it doesn’t seem to be massively used).
Spellchecking should indeed be separated but intype could bundle the hook to gnuspell if already installed on the system.
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