Cool stuff++

After spending 15 minutes writing up a node this morning, and then managing to blow it away by mis-advertently closing the wrong browser tab - (UGH!) - this has come just at the right time :)

One minor asthetic request - the "Format" menu items are obviously toggles. It would be nice to have them "ticked" (or not) as they've been applied.

And one minor annoyance - it seems to convert any linebreak into

. Wouldn't it be more appropriate (and intuitive) if it only started a new paragraph where there was a blank line separating blocks of text, and convert all other line breaks into
?

Example:

This is a line, with a linebreak
And another line directly underneath

# Converts to:
This is a line, with a linebreak

And another line directly underneath

# Where as:
Blah blah some text and random pontification that goes on for a few lines.

Then a new paragraph starts here...

# Converts to:
Blah blah some text and random pontification that goes on for a few lines.

Then a new paragraph starts here...

Cheers,
Darren :)

First, ++ indeed! and...

      ...You betcha' I'd use it!

I'll use it not only for my own fatfingered tab closings or braintfart formatting, but also to speed up the pace of replies, where OP is sitting online hoping one of us will respond.

Great idea, ++! In fact, it's something I've been toying around with trying as well, I'm glad you beat me to it (I'm not much of a GUI programmer).

I do have one feature suggestion/request. Either (a)include support for entering text in non-rich forms (like Markdown), or (b)provide a plugin text-processing architecture so other people can choose to provide Markdown/WikiText/etc. support. This would ideally be combined with the option to select a "plain text mode" for entry, then render appropriately.

Great! (Now, this node is also a candidate for nested tags.)

That is nice, because it attempts to be PerlMonks markup aware. Here's the thing I use to edit nodes locally using any editor, whether vi, Netscape Composer, or whatever.

As you can see, the default editor I have hardcoded is my local installation of Mozilla Editor (formerly aka Netscape Composer, I think).

use LWP::UserAgent;
use HTML::Entities qw( decode_entities );
use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST);
use Getopt::Long;

use strict;
use warnings;

my $base_url = "http://perlmonks.org/";
my $edit_cmd = '"C:\\Program Files\\mozilla.org\\Mozilla\\mozilla.exe" -editor "file://%s"';
my $node_id;
my $username;
my $password;

GetOptions(
	'node_id|id=s'      => \$node_id,
	'username=s'        => \$username,
	'password|pw=s'     => \$password,
	'editor|edit_cmd=s' => \$edit_cmd,
);

$edit_cmd =~ /%s/ or $edit_cmd .= ' "%s"';

	sub prompt_for
	{
		my $p = shift;
		print "\n$p: ";
		local $_ = <>;
		chomp;
		$_ =~ /^$/ and die "aborted.\n";
		$_
	}

$node_id  ||= prompt_for('NodeID');
$username ||= prompt_for('UserName');
$password ||= prompt_for('Password');

my %params = (
	op          => 'login',
	user        => $username,
	ticker      => 'yes',
	displaytype => 'xml',
	xmlstyle    => 'flat',
	node_id     => $node_id,
);

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent("NodeEditor/0.1 ");
my $params = join '&', map { $_ . '=' . $params{$_} } keys %params;
my $req = HTTP::Request->new( GET => $base_url.'?'.$params );
my $res = $ua->request($req);
$res->is_success or die "GET Error: " . $res->status_line . "\n";
$_ = $res->content;
my( $title ) = /]*>(.*)<\/doctext>/s;
$text = decode_entities( $text );
my $text_has_dos_eoln = $text =~ /\r\n/ && $text !~ /[^\r]\n/;
$text =~ s/\r//g;
my $filename = "node_$node_id.html";
my $perl_filename = "$ENV{TMP}/$filename";
open F, "> $perl_filename" or die "write $perl_filename - $!\n";
print F "\n$text\n\n";
close F;
print "\n";
system sprintf $edit_cmd, $perl_filename;
open F, "< $perl_filename" or die "read $perl_filename - $!\n";
$_ = do { local $/;  };
close F;
s/^]*>\s*//i;
my( $new_title, $new_text ) =
/^