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Tabbed Plaintext: Good or not-so-good idea?
Tuxman:
Sometimes I need the same text a few times with only a few modifications, like: for posting in my WordPress and in discussion boards. As I found it pointless to have one separate text file per format, I usually write it pseudo-formatted and do some regex search and replace on the fly.
Some days ago I had an idea how to optimize handling such things:
"Multi-paged" plaintext.
My approach:
I define a "separator" as a page-break symbol and split the text into multiple tabs then.
Raw draft:
--- ---This is text on page 1. Some more text. Yay!
==========================
This is text on page 2. Look how funny it is. Dance, joy.
--->
--- --- ________________________________________
| Tabbed Plaintext Editor |_|X|
|________________________________________|
| |________ |
| Page 1 | Page 2 | |
|________|________|______________________|
| |
| This is text on page 1. (...) |
| |
|________________________________________|
Pro:
* The "tabbed" text files are still plaintext, so they can be edited even with Notepad.
* No bells & whistles, only splitting.
Con:
Well, name them. I wanted to start coding it in January or something, so if there is something wrong with my thoughts, it would be fine if I knew it in time.
:)
rjbull:
If you're on Windows - with a handle like Tuxman I expect you have a strong preference for Linux - would mouser's Form Letter Machine be equivalent?
The Form Letter Machine is a program that will help you to write letters and emails by mixing and matching from pre-written paragraphs.
Tuxman:
Well, I like penguins :) but I don't target a specific OS.
It is similar indeed, but it works differently and does a lot of stuff that I don't need, like assigning “text types“, pairs of keys and values etc.
What I want to do is nothing more than, basically, a tabbed Notepad.
Deozaan:
Do you want it to actually create the tabs and pages in ASCII like that, or were you just using ASCII to demonstrate what you wanted?
If you really just need a tabbed text editor, why not use something like Sublime Text, Edit Pad, or NotePad++?
Tuxman:
I was just using ASCII to demonstrate what I wanted. Too lazy to do some GUI mockups.
Because they don't allow me to have multiple "pages" in only 1 file. :P
I found it pointless to have one separate text file per format
--- End quote ---
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