Refine the editor toolbar bullet buttons to avoid blank lines?

#1

Indirectly inspirted by Lines containing only whitespace - a continuing annoyance.

  • I am seeking ideas, to solve this problem;

Another problem with unwanted lines, blank or otherwise includes this example, pasting from ChatGPT

Intro

item1 paragraph

item2 paragraph

item3 paragraph

conclusion

If I want to apply bullets to this with the editor toolbar button, I get.

Intro

# item1 paragraph
# 
# item2 paragraph
# 
# item3 paragraph

conclusion
  • Can you guess why its no good?, paste into tiddlywiki.com
  • Now I need to delete the blank lines between every item before applying numbers or bullets, sometimes a long list.

When I would be happy with;

Intro

# item1 paragraph

# item2 paragraph

# item3 paragraph

conclusion

Looking at the buttons like $:/core/ui/EditorToolbar/list-number I can’t make out a way to implement this or $:/core/ui/EditorToolbar/list-bullet to ignore empty lines;

Anyone have any idea how I may achieve this?

Lines containing only whitespace - a continuing annoyance
#2

IMO it’s a feature to be able to “prepare” empty lines for input.

  • We can mark 5 empty lines and give them the prefix needed.
  • Then add the text you want.

It would be possible to create a plugin, but I’m pretty sure we should not change the default behaviour after all that time.

If a plugin would handle that it needs to be configurable. … My custom-markup plugin is able to handle it, in a slightly different way. But it will need a bit of a configuration and it’s not really intuitive.

#3

I think the custom-markup plugin contains some useful additions to the tm-edit-text-operation messages, but they are a bit specific at the moment.

I was thinking about extracting those functions into their own plugin, but I didn’t have the time to do so.

#4

Of course, this kind of problem affects not just TiddlyWiki, but many cross-application transfers of information, such as pasting from certain email messages; the inverse problem (extra line breaks) affects most copy operations from PDF files, etc.

I’m eager to see TiddlyWiki-specific solutions.

Meanwhile, in case anyone reading this thread is a mac user, I highly recommend TCleaner, a system utility with configurable clipboard transformations. It facilitates everything from basic rewrapping, trimming and stripping, smart/dumb prime/quote swaps, through upper-lower-case transformations, to regex custom replacements.

1 Like
#5

My aforementioned dot paragraph works well for this, except in the case of the subject of this topic. For more advanced users Marios custom-markup plugin can do that and more.

  • All I am asking for is a mechanism to create the editor toolbar buttons. I may try asking ChatGPT?
#6

There is some docs how to create an editor toolbar button with a keyboard-shortcut.

The missing thing is an eg: “toggle-prefix” tm-edit-text-operation parameter, which has to be javascript, since it’s not possible to manipulate text-area selections with wikitext. …

And I think it will never be, because it is not possible to manipulate it within JS code too. …

As soon as a button is clicked the selection in a text-area-widget goes away. We need to open the text-area within an <iframe> element to be able to maintain and manipulate the text selection.

#7
  • Agree, this would be a smart approach,
  • But I am confident it can be done. For example capture the selection in another tiddler, parse each line splitregexp[\n], testing each for non whitespace, and prefix only those lines.
    • This however requires a quite involved set of code.
  • I suppose I was hoping someone had a simpler method.

Perhaps looking at the code behind the various tm-edit-text-operation’s code cloning and hacking the prefix to operate only on non-blank lines.

Or even creating a ffffunction (the fff helps remind me they are filters), in tw 5.3.x functions or operator in js to operate only on non-blankank lines, a bit like your removal solution.

  • Although I don’t yet know how it works.
  • I have done this, first use save-selection message within tm-edit-text-operation, then manipulate, then insert-text the result. Replacing the selection.