custom notes editor

goathens


Greetings,

I already have my note-taking habits pretty much ingrained and the tinyMCE editor isn't really doing it for me.

Basically, I use the its-all-text firefox extension on standard text input boxes. Whenever there is a text box, I have firefox fire off an instance of my favorite text editor (vim in my case) to write the text. It even works for the Zotero web-snapshot "annotations". The problem is- it doesn't work for the tinyMCE used for writing the "notes" associated with a library item.

I suppose a feature request would be a setting in the "advanced" menu to allow the user to disable tinyMCE and just use a generic textbox, but I'm pretty technically competent: Around where in the contents of the .jar file would I find the code describing that notes section? I would be satisfied to simply replace the tinyMCE-dominated windows/components with a stupid text field.


Thanks for your help.

  • adamsmith
    this thread should help
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8784/howto-enable-additional-tinymce-note-editor-functionality/
    even if it goes the other way
  • dstillman
    It's not really that simple. Plain text and HTML are not fully interchangeable, and various Zotero components (reports, the website, Quick Copy once it's fixed) expect HTML, so if you had plain text, newlines and other whitespace would be lost or converted to HTML.

    What are the differences that are bothering you between typing in TinyMCE and typing in a generic text box? (Obviously TinyMCE isn't equivalent to vim, but neither is a standard text box.)
  • goathens
    @Dan Stillman

    Basically, the only thing that bugs me is that the wysiwyg text window in zotero isn't a standard text field. Neither is the "html" field, where you can manually edit the html. I know this is probably implementation-specific, but the textfield extension I use just doesn't recognize tinyMCE's editor field. The extension makes editing a text field a one-click process (not a select-copy-paste process) to use vim to edit the plain text field. Since the extension I used has worked in a couple different wysiwyg editors (even google docs), tinyMCE seems to be the sole exception so I'm blaming it (maybe unfairly). I don't really need most of the functionality it provides anyways, so I'm inclined to just cut it out. It would also get rid of that editor menubar in the top of the note field...

    I didn't think html was so integral to the notes function- I actually use txt2tags (think markdown) and I can convert the notes to html using my text editor anyways.
  • zhiping
    HOWTO use markdown editor replace tinyMCE ？
  • adamsmith
    you can't.
  • JeanMarieStraub
    I wrote a small command-line utility using the Zotero API to make this feasible:

    https://github.com/jbaiter/zotero-cli

    You can query for items in your library and add/edit notes in any markup format supported by pandoc with your text editor of choice.
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