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Flex Wiki Pad
.
Summary
A GUI editor for writing wiki pages using the FlexWiki syntax.

Authorship

FlexWikiPad is being developed by CraigAndera.

Questions

Direct all questions about FlexWikiPad to the FlexWikiUsersMailingList.

Status

FlexWikiPad is not at version 1.0 yet, but is quite usable.

FlexWikiPad is at release 0.93.1 as of 2004-08-21, which is a recommended update to FlexWikiPad 0.93 due to some stability bugs. This is a reasonably stable and usable release.

At this point, it allows you to:

It's not done yet, but it's a good start. Note that it specifically does not (yet) provide:

Instructions for Obtaining FlexWikiPad

FlexWikiPad lives in the FwContrib workspace, and builds are available from there now.

Getting Started with FlexWikiPad

  1. Download FlexWikiPad from here
  2. Extract it to a directory of your choosing
  3. Run flexwikipad.exe
  4. Hit F1 to launch the help

Issues With the Current Version

Description

FlexWikiPad is a "rich" client application for editing FlexWiki pages. It is a completely disconnected application: you use it to edit wiki pages on your hard drive, and do not have to set up FlexWiki on a web server at all to use it. However, it uses the same syntax for creating pages that FlexWiki does, so you can use the FwSync tool to move files back and forth between a web instance of FlexWiki and one you maintain locally on your computer. For example, you could use FwSync to download the contents of this wiki onto your laptop, use FlexWikiPad to author a number of changes while on an airplane, and then upload the changed pages back to the web server on arriving at your destination. Alternatively, you could use FlexWikiPad to author a set of interconnected pages that only ever live on your hard drive and were never put onto a web site.

FlexWikiPad is very much inspired by the excellent WikidPad application. The primary feature added is conformance with the FlexWiki formatting syntax, allowing for offline integration with FlexWiki via FwSync.

Feature Set

Here are the list of features in order of importance (as seen by CraigAndera). Feel free to contribute or add your own.

  1. Notepad equivalence. Before anything else, the ability to simply open, edit, and save text files. (Generally complete as of version 0.2.)
  2. Hyperlinking. The application should recognize wiki words like FlexWikiEditor and be able to follow them. (Generally complete as of version 0.4.)
  3. Syntax highlighting. The application should use fonts and colors to indicate things like links to pages that do not yet exist, emphasis (e.g. words in bold), and other formatting. (Generally complete as of version 0.4).
  4. Autocomplete. The application should be able to present a list of possible completions for topics. That is, if you have a topic called FlexWikiFormatting, typing in "Fle" and hitting a completion key should show the FlexWikiFormatting topic as one possible completion. (Generally complete as of version 0.5.)
  5. Linear topic list. The application should be able to present an alphabetical list of all available topics. (Generally complete as of version 0.4.)
  6. Hierarchical navigation. A user should be able to quickly navigate to pages that link to the current topic (parents) as well as topics that are linked to by the current topic (children).
  7. Hierarchical topic list. The application should be able to present a hierarchical list of all available topics, where the hierarchy is determined by which pages link to which other pages.
  8. Historical navigation. The user should be able to go "back" and "forward" through the list of recently visited topics.

Some features are orthogonal to the above list - they're more like goals than features:

What's Next

Version 0.94 will probably be oriented towards a complete rewrite of the rendering engine, to make it totally customizable. That is, you'll be able to change a config file to add or alter: fonts, colors, and the regular expressions used to parse the document. I'll probably also take a look at performance, as I'm noticing some lag when typing in longer documents.

Version 0.95 will probably be about adding rudimentary online support, so separate usage of FwSync is not necessary. I'd also like to add a "Preview" function that will require access to the web service.

Version 0.96 will probably be focused on adding hierarchical and historical navigation and fixing the tree view so it actually works.

And then if that's all the major features I can think of, I'll focus on fixing bugs, cleaning up the code, performance, and stability en route to a 1.0 release.

About FlexWikiEditor and FlexWikiPad

Summary
Explains the differences between FlexWikiEditor and FlexWikiPad.

FlexWikiPad is a completely separate effort from FlexWikiEditor. While both are Windows Forms applications that aim to make creating and managing FlexWiki content, they differ in their fundamental philosophy. Here is a list of differences:

None of these are meant to be statements about which of the two tools is better or worse. Rather, the intent is merely to point out the differences between the two tools.

See also FlexWikiGUIPhilosophyDiscussion.

Implementation

FlexWikiPad is implemented using a slightly customized version of the Scintilla.NET control. The uncustomized version is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/scide . Scintilla takes care of a large number of implementation details and makes the job much, much easier. It is released under the following license: 

    ScintillaNET is based on the Scintilla component by Neil Hodgson.
    The license for Scintilla is as follows:


    ScintillaNET is released on this same license.


    The ScintillaNET bindings are Copyright 2002-2003 by Garrett Serack
    <gserack@experientia.org>


    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Copyright 1998-2002 by Neil Hodgson <neilh@scintilla.org>


    All Rights Reserved 


    Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its 
    documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, 
    provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that 
    both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in 
    supporting documentation. 


    NEIL HODGSON DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS 
    SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY 
    AND FITNESS, IN NO EVENT SHALL NEIL HODGSON BE LIABLE FOR ANY 
    SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES 
    WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, 
    WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER 
    TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE 
    OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE. 
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Which seems to be sufficiently liberal for inclusion in FlexWikiPad.

Visual Design

Discussion

Oh boy you're keeping busy. I hope this works out to be a nice Windows Notepad replacement as well (I hate notepad) .

I'm not sure I the point of keeping FlexWikiEditor any more. It was really just a proof of concept for the FlexWikiWebService. -- OmarShahine

Busy? Nah...

Ditching FlexWikiEditor is your call. I'd probably leave it in the workspace, and maybe make a note about it being deprecated at some point when FlexWikiPad is a viable alternative. But it certainly served its purpose: without FlexWikiWebService, FwSync wouldn't have been possible. Without FwSync, FlexWikiPad wouldn't be viable. So it all works out in the end.

As far as it being a notepad replacement, the two things you might not like are the automatic formatting it does and the startup time. If I ever get to the point of making FlexWikiPad customizable enough, you can deal with the former through config settings. I hope the latter won't be an issue, but as with any CLR application, it might be. In which case we can hope that ngen will help. If all else fails, you can always strip FlexWikiPad down to something like what you want. -- CraigAndera

Is there a reason that FlexWikiPad must operate only offline? Why can't it operate either online or offline (perhaps through two different implementations of the same interface)? I would love to be able to use it as my client-side interface to a Wiki Server. Sometimes the ability to work offline is nice (and needed), but it can make getting changes back in harder... -- DavidOrnstein

Down the road, I think integrating FwSync and FlexWikiPad is a likely scenario. It's ultimately still offline, but we could think about having a checkbox that says, "Commit immediately on save". It's just that since I already have FwSync, I'm focusing on the features that don't already exist in that tool. So it's a case of "I've already bitten off as much as I can chew - let's finish that first." -- CraigAndera

I had (what I think is) a great idea tonight: FwMirror. I think it's the next logical step after getting a reasonable FlexWikiPad implementation in place, but before getting synchronization support integrated directly into FlexWikiPad. -- CraigAndera

And then, after thinking about it, realized that I'd rather have a "Synchronize" menu option in FlexWikiPad before FwMirror. I'll be implementing this feature sooner rather than later. -- CraigAndera

Craig, just started using FlexWikiPad. it is really sweet. Can I make some suggestions (I'd make them myself but I cannot build or debug the sources because I get strong name validation failed for the Genghis library - fixed in the lastest drop, and I get some very strainge problems with the editor not appearing on the form).

  1. Can you make the default font something other than Arial? Perhaps something monospaced or perhaps Verdana?
  2. Can you turn on EnableVisualStyles and set the base font of the Form to Tahoma

Great work. I'm loving local wiki editing! -- OmarShahine

Hey, thanks Omar. A few things:

  1. Can you explain what you mean by "very strange problems with the editor not appearing on the form" ?
  2. I'm aware of the issues with Genghis and signing, and will be working on those in the very near term.
  3. Changing the fonts and styles is also on the near-term feature list.
  4. I'm not familiar with EnableVisualStyles. What does it do, and why do you want it on? I'm happy to make changes - I'm just not a particularly experienced GUI programmer.
  5. Feel free to continue to post suggestions here - but I also monitor the SourceForge buglist and feature request page, so you can use those if they're more convenient.

---

Sure,

  1. If I try and open the main form in VS.NET it complains that the scnitilla object could not be created or something. Not sure if that's me or something else.
  2. Cool, the lastest version of Genghis does not seem to have this problem
  3. if you call Application.EnableVisualstyles() in your Main() method then you'll get Windows XP theme support if you also set the controls to use FlatStyle = Standard. It looks prettier .
  4. Will do that as soon as I figure SF out .

-- OmarShahine

-- CraigAndera

I just downloaded FlexWikiPad two days ago (5/21/2004 from GotDotNet "Get Latest Version" on source control), built the project, and I'm getting "System.IO.FileLoadException" occurred in FlexWikiPad.exe, additional information: Strong name validation failed for assembly 'Genghis'. How do I figure out which version I downloaded? Most of the file data/time stamps for what I downloaded are from back in March or February of 2004.... Oh, just found the reference to Source Forge http://sourceforge.net/projects/fwcontrib, I'll get sources from there and try again.... - GarnetRChaney

You're downloading it from the wrong place. Read "Instructions for Obtaining FlexWikiPad" above: you need to get the source from the FwContrib workspace. David Ornstein has agreed to remove FlexWikiPad (and FwSync, and FwDocGen) from the GotDotNet source tree to eliminate this sort of confusion.

You shouldn't need to build from source unless you really want to in any event. The FwContrib workspace has precompiled versions.

-- CraigAndera

Small request: I wish it wouldn't maximize the window for each topic that is opened. On second thought, maybe it's alright. - 9/5/04

A little addendum to OmarShahine's explanation of EnableVisualStyles:

There's a little trick to apply if you want your app to be good-looking under XP; if you just call Application.EnableVisualStyles();, you'll probably experience buggy display (especially when using treeviews or listviews as far as I could see):

 [STAThread]
 static void Main() 
 {
   Application.EnableVisualStyles();
   Application.DoEvents();


   // App stuff...
   Application.Run(...
 }

Running the DoEvents loop seems to initialize correctly the XP style (it seems to be a known bug of Windows forms 1.1; note that you don't need any of these 2 first lines in .NET 2.0 to enjoy full support of XP theme; event tabcontrols and numeric updowns which are not very well supported by framework 1.1 are well drawn by the 2.0 version...)

NB
about FlatStyle : the difference is especially visible if you use it whith buttons, textboxes and groupboxes.
NB
there's no danger to apply visual styles when running older version of windows: if the app is run under W2K or XP or W2K3 with visual styles disabled it will just look like a standard windows app (with sad grey buttons...)

-- OlivierDalet (from France: a happy FlexWiki user )

I have a project called SdiDesk (http://www.nooranch.com/sdidesk/wiki/wiki.cgi/HomePage) I wonder if any of the features there are likely to be interesting to you. (I ask because SdiDesk is a proof of UI concept rather than a product. I really want other people to incorporate similar features into their products

-- PhilJones

Interesting. I like the embedded image support (which I have considered adding to FlexWikiPad) and the macro support (which I have not). -- CraigAndera [2004-10-04]

I quite like this application, and have been using it extensively at work. Thanks for making it!

-- John Fiala (From Denver: A happy FlexWiki user as well! )

You're welcome! I'm still working on making it better - I'm just really slow since my daughter was born. -- CraigAndera

Change Log

Summary
The changes that have been made to FlexWikiPad

Release 0.93.1

2004-08-22

Checkin 1

Release 0.93

2004-08-18

Release 0.92

2004-06-13

Release 0.91

2004-05-17

Checkin 2

Checkin 1

         * Bumped version number to 0.91

Release 0.90

2004-05-15

Checkin 1

Release 0.8.1804

2004-05-04

Checkin 1

Interim Build 0.7.1802.8473

2004-05-02

Checkin 1

Interim Build 0.7.1728.5674

2004-04-28

Checkin 1

2004-04-23

Checkin 1

Interim Build 0.7.1721.7577

Owner
CraigAndera
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