
Show HN: HTML-Notepad – A WYSIWYG editor of structured documents - c-smile
https://html-notepad.com/
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qwerty456127
Seems useful! I will probably use it to prepare posts for a GitHub pages
(Kramdown) blog.

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.

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c-smile
Author of the Notepad is here. Will answer questions, if any.

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AnIdiotOnTheNet
No questions, this seems like something I would use, but boy is it broken on
Windows. Code block newline behavior is weird, saving errors out and then
clicking save will error out forever on the same file path, save-as shortcut
doesn't seem to work... this is in about 1 minute of playing with it.

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.

~~~
c-smile
"Code block newline behavior is weird" yeah. The HTML logic itself in <pre>
blocks is not "WYSIWYG friendly". CRLF is in effect only if it separates
something but not at the end of <pre> block. But I will do something with it
anyway.

"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.

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ss64
> To add mechanism of templates and wizards to pre-generate content.

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.

~~~
c-smile
I was thinking about custom widgets too (seems like your idea is somehow close
to them).

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.

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tracker1
This reminds me so much of a badly formatted question from a recruiter.

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c-smile
You have very interesting associations … If you are from Canada I would think
about consequences of the legalization.

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tracker1
I was asked if I knew about "HTML Notepad" by a recruiter in the late 90's. I
didn't know of any matching product, then I realized the question was more
about creating HTML with a plain text editor in general.

~~~
c-smile
Ah, that ...

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.

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HiHelloBolke
My wifey is a teacher in SD36. I have been trying to get her to use Markdown
to make notes for kids and create worksheets/tests. I think this will work!

~~~
c-smile
Pretty much the same situation here. My wife is writing quite a lot on
Internet these days - on near scientific subjects. I started doing that HTML-
NOTEPAD three months ago when she asked how to insert table on PhpBB forum.
Editing sequence of [tr][td]'s is not an option for her as she is naturally
blond
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blonde_stereotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blonde_stereotype)).

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gunnihinn
Umm... what?

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c-smile
PhpBB is a popular forum engine that supports so called BBCodes - variation of
markup/markdown. So you can create pretty reach discussion messages.

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.

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gunnihinn
I’m sorry, I didn’t make clear enough I was expressing surprise at your casual
sexism.

~~~
c-smile
"casual sexism" umm … what?

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?

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devwastaken
It's not about enforced equality, it's that there is no proof of your
generalizations, and trying to be an authority on it is at best reaching for
straws. We hardly know epigenetics and physical psychology. What we do know is
that people tend to fills roles they're treated as, or are looked down on when
not, so we try to diminish those effects by giving the opportunity of
equality, however that individual may want to go about it.

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.

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snacktaster
This is very nice looking and I'm going to be following the project wishing
for full markdown support. I love editors like these!

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racecar789
Thanks for the base64/inline image encoding.

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self_awareness
Nice UI and looks very functional, but it crashes when trying to insert a
table. (tried on Linux)

The application size is awesome!

~~~
c-smile
Oh, thanks for "crashes when trying to insert a table". Gone fixing it.

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finchisko
Loving the simplicity of the UI.

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badsectoracula
Looks nice, i really want a "wordpad but saves HTML files" program - i
actually use an ancient version of Frontpage Express for that (which works
just fine in Windows 10) which i used to make [0], [1], [2] and [3] (notice a
pattern? :-P) but i'd like something a tiny bit more customizable and with
slightly modern tech such as PNG image support :-P.

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/](http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/)

[1]
[http://runtimeterror.com/tools/liteproc/](http://runtimeterror.com/tools/liteproc/)

[2] [http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/](http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/)

[3]
[http://runtimeterror.com/tech/webserver/](http://runtimeterror.com/tech/webserver/)

[4] [https://i.imgur.com/ZPvaiP6.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZPvaiP6.png)

[5] [https://i.imgur.com/12iiEWb.png](https://i.imgur.com/12iiEWb.png)

~~~
c-smile
Thanks for the comment, that really interesting.

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> 
    

versus

    
    
       |<p>Foo bar</p>| 
    

(where `|` marks start/end selection positions)

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.

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Midnightas
Looks nice, but I probably won't use it for large-scale projects. Visual
software like these make it too easy to fuck something up without noticing,
which would be a pain to debug in the long run, and one can infer the tree
structure using simple indentation.

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kyberias
There's usually zero chance I want to use any other editor than the one
integrated in my IDE.

People generally don't want to use different editors for different types of
files.

~~~
c-smile
> any other editor than the one integrated in my IDE

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?

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kyberias
Are you saying that it is not common to see IDEs and other editors support
HTML in addition to other text-based formats?

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rambojazz
Apparently it comes with a non free license.

