diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'docs/users_guide_2_src/18_editors.txt')
-rwxr-xr-x | docs/users_guide_2_src/18_editors.txt | 39 |
1 files changed, 39 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/docs/users_guide_2_src/18_editors.txt b/docs/users_guide_2_src/18_editors.txt new file mode 100755 index 0000000..84c8f03 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/users_guide_2_src/18_editors.txt @@ -0,0 +1,39 @@ +\section{Visual Editors} +\label{visualEditors} + +This chapter is about maintaining Cheetah templates with visual editors, +and the tradeoffs between making it friendly to both text editors and visual +editors. + +Cheetah's main developers do not use visual editors. Tavis uses \code{emacs}; +Mike uses \code{vim}. So our first priority is to make templates easy to +maintain in text editors. In particular, we don't want to add features +like Zope Page Template's +placeholder-value-with-mock-text-for-visual-editors-all-in-an-XML-tag. +The syntax is so verbose it makes for a whole lotta typing just to insert a +simple placeholder, for the benefit of editors we never use. However, as users +identify features which would help their visual editing without making it +harder to maintain templates in a text editor, we're all for it. + +As it said in the introduction, Cheetah purposely does not use HTML/XML +tags for \$placeholders or \#directives. That way, when you preview the +template in an editor that interprets HTML tags, you'll still see the +placeholder and directive source definitions, which provides some ``mock text'' +even if it's not the size the final values will be, and allows you to use +your imagination to translate how the directive output will look visually in +the final. + +If your editor has syntax highlighting, turn it on. That makes a big +difference in terms of making the template easier to edit. Since no +``Cheetah mode'' has been invented yet, set your highlighting to Perl +mode, and at least the directives/placeholders will show up in different +colors, although the editor won't reliably guess where the +directive/placeholder ends and normal text begins. + +% Local Variables: +% TeX-master: "users_guide" +% End: + + + + |