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@aartaka@merveilles.town
Post #1829534
2026-04-30 03:10 UTC
So for some time now, I write most of the stuff I do in #HTML. In my own dialect of HTML, in fact <https://aartaka.me/pidgin.html>
And I keep noticing things that HTML editing can be. And that #Emacs—my editor of choice—does not allow (yet?) Here’s a bucket list of what I want to have in my HTML editor:
• Navigation between headings, sections, lists, and links. Quick opening of links.
• Section collapsing. Has to be smart, to handle both semantic <section>-s and raw paragraphs+headings documents.
• Table column alignment.
• Proper implied closing tags <https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#closing-elements-that-have-implied-end-tags> support. Emacs has some, but not all of them, which is annoying.
• Connected to the previous point: meaningful and configurable indentation.
• Inline styling of elements, whenever possible and meaningful. Maybe even input rendering? Emacs does some styling, but _not enough_, and it’s too restricted by proportional monospace paradigm to go all-out with styling.
• Templates. This is covered by snippet systems, like Emacs’ Yasnippet, but I’m yet to write the necessary templates for my particular workflows.
• Seamless #CSS and #JavaScript support. This is a problem for Emacs, because of its language = mode paradigm. There are three languages and only one mode.
• EDIT: And good keyboard support, with _everything_ accessible via keyboard. I forgot to include this point because I was privileged using Emacs for years now.
EDIT 2: Structural editing, with moving whole regions at once without invalidating the DOM.
Some of that is covered by #XML editors, some by Emacs, some by other editors (don’t even mention #VSCode—it sucks!) but none—by one editor.
Replies (6)
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@aartaka Came for the cool thumbnail, stayed for the amazing cursors
Open ##1830091
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@aartaka Editing HTML directly and focusing on the tools for doing it, instead of how to generate it, is an interesting approach! 🤔
Open ##1830094
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@aartaka re: automatically closing tags: I wonder if, at any given closing tag, you could close all open tags that were opened after the corresponding opening tag you are closing. 🤔
Open ##1830096
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@aartaka How do you make your rss feed? Extracting the first paragraph from the html with ed?
Open ##1830100
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@aartaka
I think it would be wise for you to learn some Emacs.
There is nothing stopping you from having what you want a I wonder if you are just not looking in the right places.
Why you prefer to edit html is beyond me. But all the features you want are possible in Emacs.
Open ##1830102
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@aartaka do u know web-mode btw?
Open ##1830105