What HTML-NOTEPAD is

It is a WYSIWYG editor of structured documents: texts that have hierarchical and semantically meaningful (oxymoron, no?) structure: headers, list, plaintext islands, tables and so on.

What HTML-NOTEPAD is not

HTML-NOTEPAD is not a “web page editor”. Don’t even expect to create “cool web pages” with it. With modern CSS, WYSIWYG Web design is simply impossible. Web pages are crafted manually by editing CSS, that is by nature of CSS.

But still HTML-NOTEPAD can be useful for Web designers too – for the cases when we need to create textual (yet structural) content of our pages. This very article I am editing in HTML-NOTEPAD:

The application

HTML-NOTEPAD uses Sciter Engine for its UI. That means it is small, fast, does not have external dependencies and works on all major desktop operating systems: Windows (from XP to 10), Mac OS and Linux.

And exactly in the same way:

Yet HTML-NOTEPAD supports “day” and “night” editing modes:

Application design goals

To support keys-only editing as much as possible:

All frequent editing actions are doubled by shortcuts. For example CTRL+NUMPAD2 will convert the paragraph into <h2> element. “Magic sequences” are in place. For example typing * and {space} at the beginning of paragraph will morph it into bullet list ( <ul><li> elements );

To support various representations of structured text that are used actively on the Web:

HTML, Markdown, PhpBB codes and their variations. If HTML then free from garbage meta-information (e.g. inline styles) injected by Word and browsers. HTML-NOTEPAD outputs just HTML (well-formed in XML sense).

WYSIWYG editing has limitations – some operations are significantly more convenient to do in source code representation. That’s why HTML-NOTEPAD supports “pass-through selection” – selection in one representation is kept in another. This helps to quickly switch between representations:

Further plans

To implement Markdown (a.k.a. “poor man WYSIWYG”), PhpBB and everything that is HTML convertible. For now it works only with HTML directly. To implement MathML’s humanistic WYSIWYG editing to pay tribute to Academia that brought us up . Not sure about SVG but thinking. Something along the lines of Observable and Jupiter Notebooks but that’s more task for Sciter Notes than for the editor. Speaking about Sciter Notes… I’ll make HTML-NOTEPAD as a companion application of the Notes. To add mechanism of templates and wizards to pre-generate content. Use case: documentation creation and editing.

More ideas like that and here is where you, the reader, can help. Please consider that option – we all need the editor of humans.