FoldingText for Atom

#1

I’m getting ready to make this more public. I’ve spend the last few weeks cleaning up the project, writing specs, working on docs and creating a website. I haven’t yet submitted it to Atom, so you can’t yet install and update through Atom, but I expect to do that next week.

  • I’m going to call it “FoldingText for Atom”.

  • You can preview the website (and from that user’s guide, etc) here:

    http://www.foldingtext.com/foldingtext-for-atom/

  • You can download and manually install the FoldingText for Atom package here:

    https://github.com/FoldingText/foldingtext-for-atom

  • Longer term I will release a standalone version of FoldingText based on this. But that’s some way down the road. The next chunk of time will be spend trying to improve get into a comfortable release cycle on FoldingText for Atom. Then I’ll thing about a stand alone app.

I haven’t kept very good track of what’s changed since the last release. Most of the work has been cleanup and documentation, so I don’t think a ton is different. Here’s what I wrote down, will do better next time:

  • Added tagging UI.
  • Added text formatting popup.
  • Select word under cursor on right click.
  • Remove item attribute when set to undefined or null.
  • Fixed opening of file path links that contain spaces.

Please poke around, try out the latest version, and report any problems.

Thanks!
Jesse

#2

I have trouble installing it

.

I assumed I had to install it similarly to Birch. So I downloaded the zip from github, went to the folder 'foldingtext-for-atom-master, ran

 apm install; apm link

and on opening atom I got the error you see above.

#3

It seems like I’ve got it working now.

I googled the term and then

brew install npm
npm install clear-cut

Seemed to do the trick

#4

Thanks for the report. This was correct:

apm install; apm link

I just forgot to list the clear-cut dependency. I just fixed that so it should work in future.

Jesse

#5

Thank you !

This is looking very good, and I like the framing of it as FoldingText for Atom

( are you thinking of moving something like the Birch Markdown package over to it, later on ? )

#6

I do expect to continue working on that package, but it will always be “separate”, not part of the core outliner download.

#7

I do expect to continue working on that package, but it will always be “separate”, not part of the core outliner download.

Sounds like a good approach …

In that context, do you envisage a standard approach to creating and viewing key=value pairs (data-key=strValue) ?

Or would it make more sense to build that into separate packages like the FoldingText-Markdown package ?

(for example I am still using a simple dialog to display and parse Taskpaper-style @key(value) strings)

#8

I think this is best as a separate package right now.

My goal is to make the core outliner package as small and correct for outlining as possible. Maybe longer term this type of feature might get pulled back into the default package… but only once it’s had a time to mature. Then I write docs, etc.

One exception to that in the current release is that the current release inlcudes tags, priorities, and status. Ideally they to would go in separate packages I think, but I thought that then no one would figure out that the outliner is extensible. So I included them for now. Eventually they might be taken out into separate packages though.

Final thought…

This is all what I’d like to do for “FoldingText for Atom”. I expect that down the road (once FoldingText for Atom and related packages are ready to replace the current FoldingText 2.0) I will release “FoldingText for Atom” + a core set of packages" as a standalone “curated” app.

That will allow non-geek users to just download “FoldingText” and not have to worry about Atom, packages, etc. That’s down the road, but definitely the end goal. FoldingText for Atom will always be targeted at people who like to hack and fiddle.

Jesse

#9

Got it – makes a lot of sense – thanks !

In the meanwhile, if any of us think of sharing related mini-packages, any preferences or guidelines on approach, standards, locations etc ?

#10

I think publishing them to Atom.io is best if you want to share them. The process is pretty easy:

https://atom.io/docs/v0.198.0/hacking-atom-package-word-count#publishing

And if you do it that way it’s much easier for others to install it and get updates.

I would suggest prefixing the name with “foldingtext-” and mentioning in the first line that the package is meant to work with the foldingtext-for-atom package.

Jesse

#11

Congratulations on this new approach Jesse. It’s great to see detailed documentation and a very clear product vision from the outset.

Can’t wait to get stuck in and discover the delights of FoldingText for Atom.

jm