Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Using ConstEdit As A WYSIWYG Html Source Code Editor

This is in response to a review which was done earlier this year in the Chrome Web Store page of ConstEdit. The review mentioned the lack of html source code viewing / editing capability with the word processor. 

ConstEdit is a word processor designed solely for editing regular documents in the html format, not as an html source code editor. No previous knowledge of html coding is required for using ConstEdit. There is no future plan to add such capabilities into the extension. But this doesn't mean that it cannot be used for html source code editing. The trick is to enable the Developer Tools which is a built-in feature of the Google Chrome web-browser. This page shows you how to edit the DOM of any html file opened in Chrome with its Developer Tools. 

To edit the source code of an html file, you can firstly open the file with ConstEdit to quickly type in its full content. The Developer Tools can then be activated to add in any required formatting not supported by ConstEdit. When Developer Tools is active, ConstEdit serves as a WYSIWYG preview of what you have changed in the Tools. When you have finished with all the changes, you can save your html file with the Save function of ConstEdit. You now have a WYSIWYG html source code editor. 

While this ConstEdit + Developer Tools approach may not have all the complex features of a regular html source code editor, it does provide a simple and handy means to get the job done quickly.