For years now, I have been looking for the perfect plain text editor that will allow me to do two things:
- I want distraction free editing within the editor window, and a chromeless experience when the editor is “fullscreen.” (Especially, on Mac, it needs to provide a fullscreen experience that does NOT implement the OS native fullscreen api. I like having things on my secondary monitor, but the OS X Mountain Lion native fullscreen api blanks out all monitors.
- I want plain text “outline” editing with intelligence like folding for outline levels, moving items around with their children, and smart indentation on wrapped long lines.
Toward that end, I have been using TextWrangler, and it offers most of what I want, but it can’t print the outlines with proper indentation, it can’t fold or manipulate outline items, and it doesn’t have a true distraction free mode or non-native fullscreen.
However, it does have two settings regarding wrapped lines that have been just enough for me as I write.
The one that is most important to me is the setting allowing me to customize the indentation of soft-wrapped lines.
Specifically, when a line is soft-wrapped, I want to be able to specify the left margin for the wrapped line.
These are the three options for line wrapping:
This is the first method for soft-
wrapping lines. You can tell that the
first line is indented, but the other
lines are flush to the left.
This is the second method for soft-
wrapping lines. You can tell that the
lines all honor the indenting of the
first line.
This is the third method for soft-
wrapping lines. You can tell
that the wrapped lines have
one more level of indenting
than the first line.
Is it possible to configure these kinds of indentations in Atom?
Also, has any work been done on implementing outlining features in Atom?
If it’s possible to write a plugin to do it, I’d be willing to work on it, if I knew it was doable with the current api.