Choosing an Editor

Why Use Anything but the Default Editor?

So you've decided to use WonderCMS and the GregCustom theme to build your site and you're asking yourself why should I need to install a special editor? What's wrong with the default?

The answer to that depends on your experience and what kind of site you are going to build. If it's just going to be an online version of an A4 piece of paper folded once or twice times, so you have in mind a four or six page web site that replicates that then the "awesome" Summernote editor may well be perfect for you. It works much like a word processor with toolbar buttons for the various ways you might want to format your text. There's not much new to learn.

However, the expectation is that you have chosen the GregCustom theme because you are expecting that, over time, your site will grow much bigger than that and you've heeded the warnings about the difficulties you might have in updating and re-formatting a site that's been built with Summernote. In that case you will be wanting a text editor, ideally one that will insert all the HTML tags you're likely to need with a range of simple easy to remember keystrokes.

What's a Text Editor?

If you're new to web design then you may not be used to using a text editor. They differ from word processors as they lack the features to control the appearance of text on the printed page. Instead think of a text editor as having only the features you might have found on a typewriter. All you can do is insert letters (upper and lower case), numbers, punctuation marks, spaces, tabs and new lines. The one added ability is that of being able to insert and delete text before the content is committed to the document.

The only text editor many will have experienced Windows Notepad and it has no facilities that help with the task in hand. A search for text editors will suggest many clearly designed for heavy duty programming in a vast variety of languages — total over kill for our limited needs. That's why I offer a few thoughts on various lightweight text editors for various operating systems that do have some helpful features if all you want is something to enter a few HTML tags and the content to go with them.

The Candidates

The Default Editor - has some useful features, but not the one I would most expect, simple keystrokes for common HTML tags

Available as Plug-ins

Summernote - A WYSIWYG, but it enters inline styling code that can be difficult to edit six months down the line.

Monaco - A programmer's editor with some tag auto-completion features, but with a steeper learning curve than I liked.

External Editors - for various operating systems

For Windows

Editor² Pronounced "Editor Squared", this is a simple text editor that includes a facility for insert snippets of text with a simple keystroke. This makes it super easy to add the various HTML tags needed when creating content for your site when using WonderCMS.

Notepad2 offers far more facilities for editing code than Editor². It's worth exploring if you want features that the default editor doesn't offer.

For ChromeOS

Text is ChromeOS' default text editor. It's not perfect for use with WonderCMS, but does have some features that are not documented and should prove adequate for most.

Android

Under preparation

Linux