4w ago

What do you use for writing HTML by hand?

I don't like front-end development but I enjoy writing things by hand rather than rely on one-off classes. Even in my blog, I tend to write a lot of HTML manually throughout the post, like creating a quick container to put two images side-by-side and center them, making blockquotes, the occasional nested list, in-line CSS, etc...

I've written some of it in VSCode and Joplin but I didn't find it comfortable to write in either of them. What editor/extensions do you use to make dealing with HTML easier? I'm currently looking at Emmet, but it looks a bit intimidating to learn.

Edit: I ended up using Emmet for writing HTML in general along with Espanso for quickly inserting some templates I use. It's working out pretty well!

29 comments

my hands

vscode with the built-in Emmet support.
Emmet isn't intimidating, unless you don't know CSS, in which case it is extremely intimidating.
html

a+b: <a href=""></a> a>b: <a href=""></a> a*2: <a href=""></a><a href=""></a> div.yeet: <div class="yeet"></div> A combination: a>b+i*2.dollah: <a href=""></a>
That's 99% of what you need to know to get started with Emmet.
Anyway, I used to write 100% hand-written HTML, but switched to using Hugo because: Go's built-in Templating language I knew from working with K8S, build-times are sub-second, and I can write a page in either Markdown or HTML, whichever I need (or even mix in some HTML in the Markdown!)
Because of hugo I don't need to mess around with repeating parts (like the nav menu).
Only downsides:
it strips the comments, which I would've loved to leave in for people to read
the formatting is my favorite, so I format with prettier before committing
I use git submodules to have the public/ folder be my Github Pages host repo, so I can just muck about locally, while I do a rebuild (which changes the files in the submodule). Only after a commit, I'll effectively publish the website.
Check out the website (mostly for the HTML - the articles are... meh): https://thaumatorium.com/ (no trackers, so no Cookiewall nonsense either :D)
- One of the only cheat sheets I've ever printed out.
- I appreciate the rundown! I started getting used to Emmet now, it's certainly more friendly than it looks. I think this is what I was looking for.
 The short-hand for CSS in Emmet is also pretty neat, but It'll take some time to get used to it. w75p m10 turns into width: 75%; margin:10px
 
 I would advise against using pixels for margin/padding since it'll have issues for users who have different zoom/text sizes than you do.
 Stick to rem for margin and padding.
 If you're still early days with css, it's worth pointing out that you should use a "css reset" file. It will solve problems for you that you don't even know exist yet.
- This is the way. It reminds me of writing pug back when it was still called Jade. Probably the only time I enjoyed writing HTML or templating.

I bit the bullet and bought the Jetbrains Ultimate bundle because I develop in lots of different languages. It includes WebStorm and it is a joy to use. It helps where necessary and doesn't get in my way..

A keyboard.
Kate
- Man kate is such a banger.
  
  KDE do a lot of good software
  
  man kate is such a banger.

I use Vim, but I don't really write pure HTML. I write Markdown and convert it into HTML as needed.
Markdown covers 95% of my HTML use cases, and I embed pure HTML into the Markdown for the last 5%.
My Markdown tools (mostly command line utilities such as Pandoc) handle HTML inside Markdown quite nicely. A few need a special "hey, there's HTML in here, pass it through unchanged" command line flag, if I recall correctly.
In a few advanced cases I'll use a variant of Jinja2 template syntax, and convert that into HTML - often with some converted Markdown mixed into it at build time.
- Out of curiosity, what do you use to convert markdown to HTML?
  
  I think they said Pandoc. I have used that too some.
  
  There's lots of good options. I currently prefer https://github.com/gomarkdown/mdtohtml

I just write everything in vim, including raw html.
Not sure what your use case is, but if it's a static website you'd probably want a static site generator so you can write in markdown and then also include raw html for things that markdown can't represent.

usually, calibre's ebook editor, but that's cause most of my html writing and editing is to make epubs.

The following isn't any professional advice or anything, I am writing HTML manually for my hobby blog code. I don't have much experience with HTML outside occasionally reading it.
I write a bit by hand, to layout my blog page, which is using HTMX. Generally I use RustRover since that actually gives details for attributes and such along with autocomplete. And apparently yesterday it asked if I wanted to enable HTMX support, which was even more intriguing. The main articles are however converted from markdown to HTML.
I do want a better way to design with preview of my page but I think it's a long shot to find something that does HTMX at the same time. Especially since that often means having segregated pieces of HTML mixed into one document at page loading.
- +1 for htmx
  RustRover feels quite heavy/bulky, why not Fleet/Zed assuming you've checked those out?
  
  I'm still a windows pleb, so no Zed for me. Fleet I haven't heard of before.
  I'm also very much one that likes a lot of convenience. RustRover is know from experience with both pycharm and Rider. But my main points are convenient functionality, autocomplete, debugger, code navigation, formatting and cleanup and git diff readily available. RustRover might be big and heavy, but it let's me focus on writing and running my code without much issues.

Hands

Depends on context, but
Notepad++
Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code
Double Commander "quick"-editor
vim
micro
Firefox dev tools (console, dom edit)
When I write HTML, I don't use IDE features but accept them in Visual Studio.

Notepad++

Thr nice thing about Emmet is you can use what you know and slowly add on to it. I don't really use the CSS shortcuts. It's really useful for writing HTML that requires a lot of elements.

Bluefish.

29 comments

A keyboard.