Never lose a post-in-progress again

[jesse_the_k]

Create a text editor in your browser with this bookmark

1. In the following box, select all and copy:

   data:text/html, <style>html,body{margin: 0; padding: 0;}</style><textarea style="font-size: 2em; line-height: 2.4em; background: %23000; color: %233a3; width: 80%; height: 80%; border: none; outline: none; margin: 0; padding: 90px;" autofocus placeholder="draft it here" />
   

2. Open a new browser tab

3. Paste into the address bar¹

4. Admire the text editor window you can now use locally. Everything you type is stored in memory on your device.

5. Bookmark the page and name it Editor

6. Whenever you want to write a post, start with the Editor bookmark.

7. Type and revise. You can even save the contents (as an HTML file)

8. When it’s time to post, select all and copy into the final post form

---

1. ignore the “security risk” message your browser may provide ↩︎

Comments

[delight]

This is great, thank you!!!

[jesse_the_k]

So happy to be of use.

[emceeaich]

You are a glorious hacker and I adore you!

[jesse_the_k]

I happily accept all adoration but credit goes to a Metafilter post (which I can no longer find), these three posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/9myn0w/code_collapsable_oneliner/

https://coderwall.com/p/lhsrcq/one-line-browser-notepad

https://gist.github.com/simonvreeman/8005654

and a couple hours poking bits of random code into the address bar to see what would happen. Do I understand it? Not a bit!

[msilverstar]

Cool!

[jesse_the_k]

<3

Department of sneaky tricks

[mdlbear]

Nice -- I stilll miss the "it's just text" extension that opened a _real_ editor in a text editor.

The trouble with text areas -- and practically everything else out there -- is that if you type while something is selected, it's gone. And you can't undo it. And I'm always selecting things accidentally while I'm typing. Or the cats do.

I just leave an Emacs window open, and select and paste from that. When I'm filling in things like job applications, I save and put the file under git control. For a while I was doing that with DW posts.

Re: Department of sneaky tricks

[jesse_the_k]

I'm not parsing your first point: are you talking about *.txt files?

Yep, to be 100% honest, I compose all my posts in iA Writer, a prose-oriented editor with Markdown and preview.

Many of the folks I've shared a couch with are more comfortable working in their browsers, so this is a sop for when Gdocs is offline.

[boxofdelights]

Thank you!

[jesse_the_k]

You’re entirely welcome!