Posted by Fernando-Basso on
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Creating-an-in-place-editor-wiki-app-using-Asciidoctor-tp6350.html

I have been using Asciidoctor for for some years now, for taking notes, making
summaries of programming, ideas, insights, etc. and I love it. I love the TOC
with links, the default HTML/CSS theme, etc. Too many things I like about
Asciidoctor to list here, actually. (I am even attempting to write a vim plugin
do some handling of todo lists more or less following the way Org-mode works
when handling "checkboxes".)

It so happens that I recently started using Zim Desktop Wiki. Two things I most
like about Zim is the "searchability" and the tree structure of the files in
the wiki as well as the table of contents for each file that happen to be
viewing/editing. Those features make Zim extremely navigable (and easily navigable).



https://i.imgur.com/wQPIOhV.png

I don't like its Dokuwiki syntax though for a few reasons that I don't think
would matter matter here.

And with that, came the idea of making a Zim Wiki clone using Asciidoctor as
the underlying markup. That means files would not only be useful for this Wiki
of mine, but would also be ready to use in external places, like README files
in Github or Gitlab, for blogging with Jekyll and whatnot and perhaps other
things.

One goal would be to implement the _in place_, wysiwyg style of editing like
Zim does.

Easier said than done :)

For me at least, editing text in such a manner (and resorting to the source only
on some specific cases) lessens cognitive burden during the writing. Also, I tried
live previews, epiphany's automatic reload, etc. and although they help, it is
a bit of a nuisance having to switch back and forth between windows or even
finding what I just wrote in source code on the split pane of Atom, for instance.
It is still a bit burdensome to me.

And then, why did nobody (to my knowledge) have done something like this
_in place_ editing for Asciidoctor yet? Perhaps it is next to impossible?

If I even attempted such a thing, I would perhaps use Electron and Asciidoctor.js.

I don't believe I would succeed, but would like to hear some commentary about
this.

Thanks in advance.