Very cool, but I'm struggling to see the purpose of this. The time it would take to focus on the textarea/ contenteditable field, then press the icon just to begin typing from a different program seems like a waste. Either that, or it has extremely narrow uses; none of which are readily apparent in my eyes.
The utility is the lower cognitive overhead of having all the UI that you don't need hidden, responsiveness, and having more lines of text visible on one screen. Similar reasons one might use WriteRoom.
I'm certain WriteRoom serves a niche. If it indeed was such a pain point in, WriteRoom should've achieved the scale of a .. Evrernote? Just saying that as developers, we tend to believe that our own little quirks is how everyone on the planet likes things to be.
It would be really cool to have some kind of a bidirectional WYSIWYG for web design. Edit a text field in a Chromium window managed by Atom, and it makes the same change in your template file (or even JSX file). Edit something in your template, and the change is instantly painted to the browser window.
I know this wouldn't be trivial to implement, though.
But I don't see the advantage of editing text areas with atom, which presents an extremely similar text editing experience compared to the experience the text area already provided. On the other hand, moving to Vim to edit a particuarly long comment or what have you makes more sense because I get to use the crazy keybindings I've drilled into my fingers.
I use It's All Text! with gvim, as well. It's a great tool when I have a lot of updates to do in large documents. That said, there is a vim mode for Atom, and this seemingly has the minor benefit of live updates to the textarea.
I suspect there are use cases where this makes sense, and, obviously, Atom is a more powerful editor than a browser textarea, though the key bindings may be similar.
Atom is a full featured text editor, like vim or emacs.
The editing experience is therefore way superior to Firefox or Chrome textarea,
and you can use all the shortcuts, plugins and goodies you are used to.
For a short comment, a basic textarea is of course enough,
but when you write something a little longer,
I think it is a real gain of time to be able to edit in a real editor.
> atom, which presents an extremely similar text editing experience compared to the experience the text area already provided
Well, that's just rude. Atom is a customizable, programmable, featureful text editor. You can certainly believe that Vim is better, but you shouldn't think that on the spectrum from browser textarea to Vim, Atom is close the textarea side.
I use and recommend It's All Text as well, but Atom is a programmer's editor, and if someone prefers Atom as their editor of choice, they'd find it a massive improvement over a browser textarea.
I have vim-mode in Atom, so its just about exactly like editing in Vim.
If you are editing a gist or inserting a code snippet in a comment then editing in Atom would be nice because you get syntax highlighting, snippets, auto-complete.
The textareas are close, but it's not the same as having the actual editor. I use UltiSnips a lot, which without the actual editor you can't use. It's the same with a lot of Tim Pope's plugins (abolish, surround, etc...).
To answer the questions of the use case, here is mine.
I spend quite a lot of time editing in Chrome, especially Github and StackOverflow, and found myself doing the following:
* Start editing in Chrome
* It becomes long so copy-paste to Atom and edit there
I have an editor opened almost all the time, so pressing a shortcut and being able to edit directly there without copy-pasting around is actually saving me some time compared to my previous workflows.
Cool, but not sure I'd use this. The only reason I could see this being used is if you're writing code into a textarea that isn't syntax-aware, or if you just really want vim keybindings when you're typing a long email.
It would be even cooler if HTML input can be edited using markdown source.
For eg., you compile an email in Gmail, but edit it using Markdown in Atom (or whatever editor); the final content gets rendered as HTML. Effectively you are sending HTML email that was composed and edited in Markdown.
I have tried this extension in Chrome; it doesn't quite do what I'm getting it, as the extension converts the markdown once and doesn't let you edit it afterwards.
The only real use-case I can see here is getting access to multi-select, and find/replace utilities, or perhaps other custom shortcuts you might use. Overall a neat little trick. Atom is not my usual editor of choice but I could see a few small potential use cases.
I wind up copying text into Sublime all the time to do my formatting then paste it back into my browser.
Things like GitLab, GitHub, Bugzilla, Wikis, etc.
You have a comma separated list of strings like
"one", "two", "three", "four"
and need to turn them into Markdown bullets
- one
- two
- three
- four
I usually copy-paste longish things to the text editor (or at least to clipboard) to avoid data loss in case the webapp crashed / browser crashed / HTTP request failed / I mistakenly pressed backspace when out of the textarea (which navigates to previous page)
Yup, neat little trick. Also, I think this might be useful for answering or asking question on StackOverflow. Gods knows how hard it is to format your codes properly on those sweet little box.
Does anyone else jump into an editor to write emails or essays?
I find myself wanting simple, distraction-free plain text with no UI cruft for any writing more than a few sentences.
Personally I'm using either the Write Space extension for Chrome or Sublime today, but it seems like the author has the same use case, and with the added convenience of auto sync.
Yes. For one, I don't trust myself to not accidentally hit a keyboard shortcut I'm used to using on my native editor, but happens to collide with an important function in the email client. I also despise gmail's interface in general these days.
If I need to edit outside my browser, I would normally just press Alt+Tab to switch to my text editor, type the text, then Ctrl+C, Alt+Tab, Ctrl+V. It feels about as fast and works with all web browsers and text editors.
Maybe you’ve seen the terminals T-Mobile/T-Online put up everywhere instead of payphones, which are basically payphones with WiFi hotspot and a touchscreen with webbrowser.
Every time I see a chromebook, I am reminded of those "Smart payphones", because they are as much of a computer.
i'm more interested in the screenshots window manager.
having been forced on a mac recently... just the fact i can't move my windows with <one key>+<mouse left button> is driving me crazy. and to add insult, the title bar that i have to hit to move windows is smaller then anything on browsers such as chrome and firefox.
i guess i saw something that reminded me of the cocoa/whatever-osx-UI on the the screenshots. but looking closer now, there is nothing other than atom and chrome, both have custom inconsistent UIs that do not hint the OS they are running on. you are right, it can be linux or anything else.
I'll continue to maintain IAT! as long as it can work in Firefox.
Firefox is changing its security model for extensions to make it more like Chrome's. Eventually, it will be impossible for IAT! to work as a pure extension anymore.
Over the years, I've been working on IATED (https://github.com/docwhat/iated) which was meant to be a replacement for IAT! -- a sort of IAT! next generation.
IATED would be two parts: a server to open the editor and an extension that talks to it.
But I've become distracted and disheartened by figuring out how to make it as simple to install and use as IAT! yet remain secure.
Some issues:
* I know enough security practices to know I'm not even close to being an expert. IATED has the potential to do really bad things if insecure. Letting a malicious page read random files on your file system (or worse, write them!) is the obvous vector.
* I would want to support the same platforms: Linux, OS X, and Windows. But each platform has very different requirements. Windows users are going to be confused if IATED is purely command line driven, for example.
* What language should I write it in. I have several false starts, with the current 'master' branch being JRuby. But depending on the JVM seems horrible. 'golang' is pretty new and maybe the way to go. I'm not sure.
* I work on IAT! mostly alone, though xOneca has been a great help. Writing IATED by myself is discouraging. I'd love to have someone who knows about golang or Windows or security help me write IATED.
Anyway, that's roughly the state of IAT! and IATED at the moment.
87 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadThis seems like a fun programming exercise with little real utility.
It would be really cool to have some kind of a bidirectional WYSIWYG for web design. Edit a text field in a Chromium window managed by Atom, and it makes the same change in your template file (or even JSX file). Edit something in your template, and the change is instantly painted to the browser window.
I know this wouldn't be trivial to implement, though.
this works today, really well. give it a shot.
[1]: http://melpa.org/#/edit-server [2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/edit-with-emacs/lj...
What a cool idea.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/its-all-text/...
But I don't see the advantage of editing text areas with atom, which presents an extremely similar text editing experience compared to the experience the text area already provided. On the other hand, moving to Vim to edit a particuarly long comment or what have you makes more sense because I get to use the crazy keybindings I've drilled into my fingers.
I suspect there are use cases where this makes sense, and, obviously, Atom is a more powerful editor than a browser textarea, though the key bindings may be similar.
I have to take issue with your notion of "full featured". Atom is a fine editor with plenty of features but it's orders of magnitudes short of emacs.
Well, that's just rude. Atom is a customizable, programmable, featureful text editor. You can certainly believe that Vim is better, but you shouldn't think that on the spectrum from browser textarea to Vim, Atom is close the textarea side.
If you are editing a gist or inserting a code snippet in a comment then editing in Atom would be nice because you get syntax highlighting, snippets, auto-complete.
Am going to use this for some aged web forms at work that have pretty hostile UX and that I often c&p into rather than bother trying to type.
[1] https://github.com/ardagnir/pterosaur
* Start editing in Chrome
* It becomes long so copy-paste to Atom and edit there
* Copy-paste back to Chrome
To avoid this, I have then be using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoil... to edit directly in Chrome but thought that it would be better to use a real editor rather than a subset, which is why I created this package.
I have an editor opened almost all the time, so pressing a shortcut and being able to edit directly there without copy-pasting around is actually saving me some time compared to my previous workflows.
For eg., you compile an email in Gmail, but edit it using Markdown in Atom (or whatever editor); the final content gets rendered as HTML. Effectively you are sending HTML email that was composed and edited in Markdown.
I never understood the appeal of markdown. Why would this be beneficial to you?
You want to use Atom's Markdown preview of a reddit comment or a github issue or anything else that takes Markdown.
You want autosave of a comment/input in case you accidentally close the tab, navigate away, or restart your browser.
You want to write code in a comment/email.
You want to use more advanced editing commands, things like undo-tree.
Things like GitLab, GitHub, Bugzilla, Wikis, etc. You have a comma separated list of strings like "one", "two", "three", "four" and need to turn them into Markdown bullets - one - two - three - four
... an easy task for sublime or Atom
It happens rarely but when it happens, it hurts.
But I use many browsers, webapps reset the forms contents with JS etc. It's complicated.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-...
I find myself wanting simple, distraction-free plain text with no UI cruft for any writing more than a few sentences.
Personally I'm using either the Write Space extension for Chrome or Sublime today, but it seems like the author has the same use case, and with the added convenience of auto sync.
There still isn't a good text editor that does regex find and regex replace (caret doesn't).
Every time I see a chromebook, I am reminded of those "Smart payphones", because they are as much of a computer.
https://floobits.com/ https://floobits.com/help/plugins/atom
They also support Sublime.
having been forced on a mac recently... just the fact i can't move my windows with <one key>+<mouse left button> is driving me crazy. and to add insult, the title bar that i have to hit to move windows is smaller then anything on browsers such as chrome and firefox.
i guess i saw something that reminded me of the cocoa/whatever-osx-UI on the the screenshots. but looking closer now, there is nothing other than atom and chrome, both have custom inconsistent UIs that do not hint the OS they are running on. you are right, it can be linux or anything else.
I personally use Divvy because Spectacle didn't exist when I first started using mac
[1] http://xmonad.org/
[2] https://www.archlinux.org/
I have some bugs open on the project and maybe someday I can switch from Vim to Atom comfortably.
I also hear that the It's All Text! author is lazy... every time I go home to the family. ;-)
Are you saying that you're its developer, and that you're not going to maintain it anymore?
That would certainly make me sad :(
I'll continue to maintain IAT! as long as it can work in Firefox.
Firefox is changing its security model for extensions to make it more like Chrome's. Eventually, it will be impossible for IAT! to work as a pure extension anymore.
Over the years, I've been working on IATED (https://github.com/docwhat/iated) which was meant to be a replacement for IAT! -- a sort of IAT! next generation.
IATED would be two parts: a server to open the editor and an extension that talks to it.
But I've become distracted and disheartened by figuring out how to make it as simple to install and use as IAT! yet remain secure.
Some issues:
* I know enough security practices to know I'm not even close to being an expert. IATED has the potential to do really bad things if insecure. Letting a malicious page read random files on your file system (or worse, write them!) is the obvous vector.
* I would want to support the same platforms: Linux, OS X, and Windows. But each platform has very different requirements. Windows users are going to be confused if IATED is purely command line driven, for example.
* What language should I write it in. I have several false starts, with the current 'master' branch being JRuby. But depending on the JVM seems horrible. 'golang' is pretty new and maybe the way to go. I'm not sure.
* I work on IAT! mostly alone, though xOneca has been a great help. Writing IATED by myself is discouraging. I'd love to have someone who knows about golang or Windows or security help me write IATED.
Anyway, that's roughly the state of IAT! and IATED at the moment.
Ciao!
(I have zero experience with webkit to know if this is a reasonable undertaking.)