Publish Markdown Plugin

In our last tip, we went over how to manually order files and directories within the TKE sidebar. What we didn’t cover is why you would ever want to manually sort files in the sidebar in the first place. One such reason we would do this is to control the order that files are processed within a directory from something like a plugin. The Publish Markdown plugin is one plugin which uses the sidebar ordering of the files to collate Markdown files into a single file and then hand that single file to a Markdown processor for export. This allows you to split your Markdown document into separate files (say, a file per chapter or section) and then organize the files into a particular order to generate a single export document.

After the plugin is installed, it is accessible by right-clicking on a sidebar item. If the item is a directory, all files within the directory and all of its subdirectories will be traversed and organized, in order, into a single temporary Markdown file. After this is complete, the export window will be displayed.

Publish Markdown Export window

If you want to save the file, select “Publish To”, select a directory to save the file to, and click “Publish”.

If you want to export the file as HTML directly, select “Publish To”, select a directory to save the HTML file to, select the “Export As HTML” option, and click “Publish”.

If you want to send the resulting file to an external application, select “Open In”, choose the application from the dropdown list (more on this in a bit), and click “Publish”.

Plugin Options

The Publish Markdown plugin has several options to configure its behavior that are accessible from the Preferences window within the Plugin panel. Select the “publish_markdown” option from the pull-down menu to reveal the options.

Publish Markdown Preferences Panel

You can specify an alternative Markdown processor, select which file extensions will be considered for inclusion, select which file patterns can be used to ignore certain files and setup the external applications that can be accessed by this plugin.

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

Calendar Plugin

This tip is a fairly quick one. If you have ever needed/wanted to generate a monthly mini calendar, TKE 3.3 now has the all new Calendar plugin which will accomplish just that.

Inserted Calendar Text

 

After the plugin in installed, place the insertion cursor in the editing buffer where you want the calendar to be inserted. Then select the Plugins / Calendar / Insert Mini Calendar menu option. This will display the date range selection window as shown below:

Date Selection Window

 

Use the window to select the starting and ending month to generate and select the OK button to instantly insert a calendar in your editing buffer. Each consecutive month will be inserted below the previous month. To insert a single month, just make sure that the starting and ending month are the same.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference.

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

Perforce Plugin

This plugin may only apply to a small subset of the TKE user base who use Perforce for their version control system, but it’s a really handy one that does one thing really well. When you are working with Perforce-controlled files, getting permissions to edit a file requires that you always execute the ‘p4 edit <filename>’ command before you save the file contents. This usually means that you need to open a terminal, enter the command, then go to your editor where you make and save the change.

The Perforce plugin, when installed, automatically performs a p4 edit on the file when the file is saved. This will greatly improve your workflow when editing Perforce-controlled files (so much so that it will bother you to use other editors that don’t have this feature).

To install the plugin, simply click on the Plugins / Install… menu item and select the Perforce plugin from the available list. Before using the plugin, select the Plugins / Perforce / Edit include directories menu option. This will open a settings file in a new editing buffer which will look like the following:

# Host Directory
# ——— ————

Below the line, enter the name of the server containing the Perforce view that you would like to edit (i.e., the result of executing the ‘hostname’ command on *nix filesystems), followed by one or more spaces, and the base directory containing the Perforce view to edit (i.e., the result of displaying $P4WORKAREA in a terminal). Save the file, close it, and you are ready to start editing without the tedium ad nauseum of ‘p4 edit’ madness. You can add as many Perforce host-directory combinations that you need, if you are someone who works with multiple views on several machines.

If at any time, you want to disable this feature, simply select the Plugins / Perforce / Disable edit on open menu option. The plugin even provides a feature which will revert the current file if you want to throw away changes made to the file since the last file submission via the Plugins / Perforce / Revert current file menu option.

Once you have this plugin enabled and firing on all cylinders, you’ll never want to go back.

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

Choosers Plugin

If you use different tools for selecting and getting the programming values for things such as fonts, colors or pathnames to directories/files somewhere in your file system, then the Choosers plugin will come in handy. After installing it (select the Plugins / Install… menu item and select the “Choosers” plugin from the resulting list), the Plugins menu will be populated with the new Choosers submenu which contains four menu options:

• Color
• Font
• Directory
• File

The Color item will display the standard color picker widget available on your particular platform. On MacOS and Windows, the color picker even contains an eye-dropper that will allow you to select any pixel color on your screen which can be super handy. After selecting the color, click the Choose button to copy the RGB color value to the clipboard.

The Font item will display the font picker widget which will allow you to select a font family, weight and size, including the ability to add underline and strikeout features to the font. The resulting font string value will be copied to the clipboard when the Choose button is clicked.

Font Chooser Window

The Directory and File items allow you to browse your file system for a given directory/file using open file browser available on your particular platform. Selecting the Open button will copy the pathname to the clipboard.

Just some handy plugin functionality to help make your programming workflows better.

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

URL Validator Plugin

URLs are all around us, sitting in text files which, when rendered, make up the fabric of the world-wide web. For as many good links there are, there are probably just as many URLs to non-existent web pages. If you enter URLs by hand, there are also opportunities for making fat-finger mistakes. Wouldn’t it be great if your text editor had some ability to verify any embedded URLs in its files?

Well, if your text editor is TKE, you do with the help of the URL validator plugin.

After the plugin is installed, going to the Plugins / URL Validator menu will display a few options. You can have the plugin find and validate all embedded URLs in the current file. You can select any URL-styled text and verify that text selection’s validity. You can also bring up an entry field in which you can enter a URL directly and verify it.

Whenever a validation occurs, the plugin will display the results in a separate window, represented in the following image.

URL Validator Result Window

Note that the validated URL is displayed with a good/bad icon, indicating the correctness of the URL. Additionally, the returned status and code are output in the window along with the line number within the editing buffer that contains the URL. You can jump the insertion cursor to the given line number by clicking on the URL entry in the status window.

Super simple. Super handy. What else would you expect?

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

Colorizer Plugin

If you do any work in HTML and CSS, you’ve probably spent your fair share of time coding color values; however, a value like “#432958” doesn’t really help you know exactly what color that value represents. Wouldn’t it be nice if the text editor could let you quickly visualize these color values?

TKE’s CSS Colorizer plugin to the rescue. If you are editing an HTML or CSS file, the Colorizer plugin will parse for all valid CSS-styled color syntax and set the background color of the syntax to the color that it represents.

 

To install the plugin, select the Plugin / Install… menu option and then select the “CSS Colorizer” from the resulting plugin list. Once the plugin has been installed, you can colorize any HTML/CSS/SCSS file by selecting the Plugins / CSS Colorizer / Colorize menu option. This will immediately colorize all of the color syntax within the current file.

Once you have selected the colorize menu option once for a file, any subsequent saves of that file will automatically re-colorize the file. You can also re-select the colorize menu option at any time to re-parse the file.

The following color syntax is supported:

• #RRGGBB
• #RGB
• rgb( red, green, blue )
• rgba( red, green, blue, alpha )
• hsl( hue, saturation%, luminosity% )
• hsla( hue, saturation%, luminosity%, alpha )

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

Markdown Table Beautifier Plugin

In TKE 3.2 a new plugin called the “Markdown Table Beautifier” is included which, when run, cleans up any table syntax found inside of a Markdown document. This essentially involves, making all table columns be vertically aligned and all cell contents be justified according to their column justification indicators. It also will adjust all rows to include the maximum column specified within a table row. All of this cleanup helps make Markdown tables easier to read in Markdown format.

Essentially the Markdown Table Beautifier plugin can run on all tables found within a single Markdown file or it can run only on the table where the insertion cursor is within.

To install the plugin, select the Plugins / Install… menu option, find the Markdown Table Beautifier plugin in the resulting list, highlight it and hit the RETURN key. Once the plugin has been successfully installed, you can run it by simply selecting the Plugins / Markdown Table Beautifier submenu and choosing one of the two available options to beautify all tables or only the currently selected table. Note that these menu options will only be enabled if the file syntax is either Markdown or MultiMarkdown.

Clean and easy to read tables without the fuss? Check and check.

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

The current_line Plugin

Perhaps its just a case of aging eyes, but sometimes I find myself searching for the current line that the cursor is on. I could adjust my theme’s cursor color to change it to make it easier to find; however, there is a plugin called the “current_line” plugin which highlights the entire line that the insertion cursor is currently on.

To install the plugin, click on the “Plugin” menu in the main menu and select the “Install…” menu option. In the resulting plugin preview window either type a portion of the name “current_line” or use the up/down arrows to find and select the plugin and hit the RETURN key. At the bottom of the TKE main window, a message indicating that the current_plugin is now installed will be displayed.

 

From that point on, all editing buffers will highlight the current line. What’s nice is that if you change the theme, the current line plugin will continue to work, adjusting the current line to go nicely with the theme’s background color.

To see more information and download your copy of the TKE code editor, visit http://tke.sourceforge.net.

Gimme Some Ipsum

Sometimes you are working on some code that includes layout work and you just want to insert some dummy text into the mix so you can see how things look.  That’s a job for Ipsum Lorem, a text generator that creates filler text so you don’t have to.  And for those times, TKE has your back through two different mechanisms: the lorem plugin and Emmet.