blogging in text and text editors

I've been testing going all-in on writing blog posts only in text. I'm doing this for two main reasons: 1) I've realized that if I ever want to be fully comfortable in code, I'm just going to have to take the plunge and just write in it a lot (practice makes perfect, right?) and 2) I was tired of what a pain it is to work in WYSIWYG in Blogger, etc.

standard text editor with online check

So I started with my trusty Notepad++ and it works great. The one disadvantage was that I then had to test the code somewhere. I googled "test html editor" and found quite a few including online html editor (requires disabling Adblock), htmledit from squarefree, code beautify, and W3Schools HTML Editor. These are basically two-pane editors where the code goes on side and then you can generate a preview on the other side. Again, these work great, but required being online and that extra step.

Simplenote?

Then I thought-- what about using Simplenote? It makes use of basic text, has a bunch of different apps (for Windows, Android, etc.), and handles markdown. The desktop version even comes with a preview and I could access it from everywhere! In fact, I'm writing this post in Simplenote! But I hit a snag- Simplenote works great for handling markdown, but there's not really a preview for html/xhtml code. Of course you could write in HTML, but Simplenote isn't the best editor for that (no numbered lines, auto codes, colors).

full on HTML editor?

So I went back to looking for a full service HTML editor. Another Google search turned up the following: Upwork's post about text editors and a discussion in CodeAcademy. The winning options seemed to be Sublime Text, Atom, and Brackets.io. Upwork's post gives a great review and I decided to try Brackets because it's free, open-source, and has a preview pane.

Conclusion

I haven't tested Brackets yet so I can't really give a full review of how well it worked for me... and after writing this post in Simplenote, I'm kind of lamenting that I can't make markdown work in Blogger (there are ways). Markdown is so much faster and easier than html! At any rate, I think what's going to happen is that I'll probably use one of those html editors regularly, but in a pinch, I'll use Simplenote and just copy and paste Simplenote's Preview directly into Blogger (there are quirks...like different texts, etc.). Still....