+15
Under review

Scratchpad / ToDo list

Alexander Blach (Developer) 14 years ago updated 14 years ago 6
Customer Request received by mail: "I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Elements text editor app. It's a simple text editor app that syncs its contents out to Dropbox. As part of that program there is a scratchpad function that allows for side notes when working on a file. My guess is that its doing something like storing scratch not information in the metadata for the file or something. That's what I'm talking about.

Think of it this way. When you open Textastic you see the list of files that you're working with. When you select a file (in this case let's say it's a python script) the app reads the metadata and constructs a Todo list or side note section for that particular file. What it might contain is something like this:

1.) Need to add a hash bang (#!) for running scripts on Linux.
2.) Need to remember to properly format code for easy reading.
3.) Need to properly comment the code so I can remember what the hell I was thinking when I wrote it.


Does that help? You can take a look at the Elements text editor app to get an idea of what I'm getting at. I don't know if they store it in metadata or not. That's just a guess on my part, but it seems logical."
I already store information like last cursor position and custom syntax definition setting for each file in the upcoming 1.1 update of Textastic. It should be relatively easy to add a scratchpad feature. I might add an auto-resizing textfield in the file info popover. People could use this for whatever they want to note about the file.

The only downside I see is this: it wouldn't be copied over when copying the file to another app or computer or if you send it via email.
+1
The idea is not bad... Perhaps Textastic could parse over the text and fill the scratch pad with comment lines starting with
   - ' TODO '
   - ' FIXME '
or whatever...
+1
Yeah, that's certainly an interesting idea. That way it would also be included in the actual file (in comments) and available to other applications as well. Textastic could display a list of TODO items.

That reminds me of this idea: http://feedback.textasticapp.com/feedback/7796-show-a-list-of-functionsclass-methods/

The scratchpad, which is only available in Textastic, could be an additional/separate feature
this style used in rails, look http://ryandaigle.com/articles/2007/2/26/what-s-new-in-edge-rails-source-code-annotations

your can make group in File Properties, like: notes
and scan file to comment
Thanks for pointing that out!
Comment received by mail: "I don't think that the information not copying over when moving the file would be all that big a deal unless you were moving control of the file over to a new location and deleting it from the device. In cases like that you might consider a safety feature that warns you that you'll lose that data and then have it offer to copy that information to a separate txt file to send along witih the original so that the information is not lost."