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diff --git a/www/users_guide/editors.rst b/www/users_guide/editors.rst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35bf0a5 --- /dev/null +++ b/www/users_guide/editors.rst @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@ +Visual Editors +============== + +(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 +{emacs}; Mike uses {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. + + |