Writing in the editor

Open editor/index.html straight from disk. There is no server to start, because the editor has nothing to talk to.

The loop

The whole writing loop is o, type, Enter, type, Enter — never leaving the home row. One keystroke restyles the line under the cursor, and the line wears its style as you write it.

• o — new line below, straight into editing
• Enter — commit this line and open the next one
• D — remove the line
• J and K — move the line itself up and down
• ^Z and ^⇧Z — undo and redo, one writer's action at a time
• ? — every key, and every command

One key per type

Tab cycles the dialect of a code or CLI line, and :lang php picks one by name, which is quicker once you know there are fifty-nine of them. A CLI dialect also picks the prompt the line is drawn with — $ for bash, PS> for PowerShell, >>> for a Python session.

The document, and what it is called

The topbar has the four things that act on the whole document: Open .md, New .md, Export .md and Clear. There is no save button, because there is nowhere to save to.

The tab bar shows the name the file will have, and only the name. Click it to type a new one, or press R. Until you set one it follows the title, so naming a post is usually just writing its heading. The directory is not shown there because it is not something you set there — it comes from the category: meta line, and E shows the two together as the path the file belongs at. A Sub-category is written with its parent: category: guides/hosting is content/guides/hosting/.

$ ls content/guides/

hosting  index.md  install-in-five-minutes.md  publishing-is-a-file-copy.md  writing-in-the-editor.md

The command line

: opens it, Tab completes, Enter runs. Everything the editor can do is there — set, lang, move, fold, name, title, cat, meta, open, newdoc, clear, undo, export, size, theme. Press ? for the full table; it is generated from the commands themselves, so it is never out of date.

Split screen

Press b to split the window: the lines on the left, the page as a reader will see it on the right, both updating as you type. B swaps the sides. The panes stack vertically on a narrow window.

Content size

+ and − step the document size, and 0 puts it back to 100%. It applies to both panes, and it is remembered for next time. The buttons in the tab bar do the same thing for the mouse.

Folded output

A run of output lines under a code block is that block's result, and it is folded by default so the commands stay readable.

$ rsync -az content/ deploy@example.com:/var/www/example.com/site/content/

sending incremental file list
content/guides/writing-in-the-editor.md
sent 4.2K bytes  received 95 bytes  2.86K bytes/sec

Press z to fold or unfold the output of the block under the cursor. The cursor never gets stuck inside something folded: moving onto a hidden line unfolds it rather than leaving you typing into nothing.

Pictures

Press f for an image line and a to write its file name and its caption. A bare name — overlay.png — is a file in the document's own directory, site/public/media/<category>/<name>/, so two documents can each have a shot.png. The read pane looks there too, beside the editor's own page, and shows the picture; a file it does not find is a box with the name in it.

Not yet

A meta line published: false keeps a document off the site while its file is on the server: no address, no listing. Any value but true keeps it off, so a typo never releases a draft. The preview shows the document as it will read once the line is gone.

Getting the file out

Press E. You get the markdown, the path it belongs at, and a copy button — the editor's only output is a file. It never had a connection to anywhere.