page v1.0, 2009-03-25

Wiki Editor Plugin for Notepad++

Description

Notepad++ is a free text editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages, based on the powerful editing component Scintilla. It's got an interface to develop plugins enhancing its functionality.

This plugin offers a toolbar with often-needed functions when editing Wiki articles offline: set text to bold, italic, as headline, as internal link and so on. The button set can be edited by user.

The main feature of this plugin is a live preview of the article in the real Wiki system! It uploads the article text to a safe site (usually the Wiki-user's profile page) and displays the article preview. It's not intended to make permanent changes to the Wiki system!

the author

the authorBastian Blumentritt, 30, lives in Erfurt, Germany. He works for a medium-sized software company and studies Computer Science at the Technical University of Ilmenau in his spare time.

contact

Preview

The first screenshot shows the free flowing toolbar in Notepad++. It can be docked on any side. The button set can be edited via the context menu (right mouse button).

The second screenshot shows the dialog when editing a button. As you can see, there are four types of buttons:

  • HTML-Tags
    Encapsulates the current selection in HTML-styled tags with optional attributes, like <span class="x">text</span>.
  • Custom Tags
    Encapsulates the current selection in custom start- and end tags, like == for marking headings and so on.
  • Single Phrase
    Inserts given text phrase at cursor position, like --~~~ for the signature.
  • Web-Preview
    Opens the given URL, which has to point to a valid Wiki-page in edit-mode, inserts the document to the Wiki-form and submits the Wiki-form like the user pressed the "Preview Article" button. From the resulting page, it extracts the part of the page, where the preview is being displayed and shows only this part.

The third screenshot shows such a Wiki preview. It is a non-modal window, so it can be left open while editing the text in Notepad++. It has buttons for updating the preview based on the actual Notepad++ document and for closing the window.

Toolbar Button configuration Wiki preview

Dependencies

Running this plugin needs a Windows OS (tested on XP) and a Notepad++ (tested on 5.2 unicode). Using the Wiki preview needs a user account on any Wiki system and Internet Explorer (Version 5 and up) installed.

Compiling the source needs a Delphi 2005 (or newer) programming environment and the Delphi Foundation for Plugins for Notepad++.

License

Wiki Editor is free software released under GPLv3.

Releases

2009-01-25: Release 1.0

  • first official release

Binary Unicode (ZIP) ANSI (ZIP) Delphi Source Code ZIP

Current Features

  • toolbar, docking or flowing
  • configurable toolbar buttons
  • live preview of the article

Future Features

  • don't know, what's missing?!

Related Links