Feature Requests? Roadmap?

  1. Is there a place to post Feature Requests?
  2. Is there a roadmap? I’d hate to keep coming up with Feature requests :slight_smile:

You're welcome to post on these forums, email whisk-betafeedback@tumult.com, or use the Whisk > Provide Whisk Feedback… in-app mechanism.

We don't provide a public roadmap... but please do send any feature requests as they definitely influence the product direction! Even if they are a duplicate, hearing it another time or in a different way can be extremely helpful for the priorities. Thank you!

Ok, I’m coming from a Hype background and have use Coda for a considerable time, and I … dunno … was expecting more from Whisk, maybe? Politely, but bluntly, put – I’m not seeing the point. Here’s why.

There’s a ton of tools out there that will easily reload my pages when things change. And many of the common editors have templating-like capabilities.

What I was expecting was an editor that worked the way I think and can keep me straight, that is to say… if I try to make something bold, warn me I should be using strong; if I have an orphaned tag, point it out; if I have unstructured content, help me properly reindent; if I try to make something that’s invalid, like wrapping the whole to in a scream bloody murder. I’d like an editor that sees what I cannot or am looking past – but at the same time, let me override. There’s so many clever things a new editor can do that others aren’t – right now this doesn’t even have search and replace.

Want to make sure I’m not being unfair by asking is this just the start and the product is organically growing, or is this at a near end-state and we’re helping with the final polish. Unless I’ve missed something grave, it’s not doing the kind of magic things Tumult is known for.

Don't worry, I do understand where this feedback comes from! It is true that this is not a full-featured editor and we describe it as "lightweight." I do go over some use cases in this post and point out a couple items where the new version may provide advantage.

The previous HyperEdit did have a live validation that would red-underline and show mistakes in HTML4 and XHTML documents. Unfortunately the validator we previously used could not support HTML5. I am hoping to bring this back soon, but there are a few licensing and technical hurdles.

Whisk uses OgreKit that allows for advanced regular expressions in find and replace. You should be able to get to it via the standard Command-F. Are you not seeing it?

HyperEdit was my first shareware project that I started while in college in 2003. It has been on the back-burner for a while, but I (and as an extension Tumult) have a commitment to maintain and update the software we make!

The first step and goal for 2.0 is to support Catalina, modernize the code, and bring UI consistency with Hype. So for a 2.0 beta there won't be too many more features added, but this release represents a step on further development and hopefully more exciting/compelling features in the future. We're welcome to all feedback :slight_smile:. Thanks!

Ok, this is weird… I’m still inside the same open Hype session I had when I wrote the post (admittedly, I’ve been poking around more) and I totally see the search and replace, as well as all the other goodies under the Edit menu. I swear when I was walking through the menus looking for features, it was surprisingly sparse. Now I’m totally doubting myself, because I can’t seem to get what I saw reproducible. So for now, I openly retract that observation.

Maybe what I was seeing was that (first time use) was Edit / Replace did nothing and gave no visual clue anything was happening, happened, or should happen (because there was no substitution defined). What I expect to happen is that if a command can’t be fulfilled, then either a notification “(0) replacements made.”, a warning “No substitution provided.”, or the far more obvious: open the Find… window for me.

Also, if I use Find… --but the focus is on the browser preview pane-- then I’m expecting it to find on the page, but it doesn’t. Nor does it seem to find the match in the source code. But if I then click from the Find… panel to the main app, and click a second time to put focus in the source, then it does work. Not sure how the behavior should go: always search in source, or be able to search in both panels.

As for the Whisk and Catalina modernization roadmap, I do get where you’re coming from.

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It’s be really handy if one could click highlight a tag and have information (say from W3C Schools, or at least that quality) become available.

There’s always different attributes that are or aren’t legal depending on which DOCTYPE is being followed; being able to see what one should be using would be super handy.

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What I’d love is rather than opening a file is to be able to open a foreign URL, have it load the page (and perhaps some image resources in memory) and let me change the HTML and see the effect, then if I like it, save it.

I’m aware there are CSS editors that do something similar.

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Yup - this is a definite current limitation. I've added this to our tracker.

I love the idea! Similar to Xcode, the new Whisk inspector panel could show this info.

Oh that would be quite neat too... I'll add this one to the tracker as well.

Thanks for the feedback!

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It would be super handy to collapse ▼ / expand :arrow_forward: element’s and their children.

Likewise having drop-lines so that one can see if indentation is correct would be helpful.

// My brain juices are going a mile a minute, but the forum software won’t let me post multiple consecutive responses until someone replies, so I’m unable to break these into more organized chunks for you… //

I’d also like the ability to Bookmark various spots and return to them. I’m usually working with longer pages that fit on the screen, and having to compare blocks of code (so multiple views into the same source is helpful, as is opening multiple files at once), causing me to jump back and forth.

I’d be great if it kind of versioned save point while the application was open. That way if you did something, saved, did something else, saved, and did something else, saved, etc. you could then do a diff between various save points. (Oh, how that could help recover something that got stomped on.)

Something else that would be handy is navigation by CSS Selector or X-Path. Having the ability to find in the source something by Id or pattern would be great.

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Awesome, thank you for the additional requests!

Your ideas about bookmarking/navigation make me think of another one: a list of most recently edited elements (by id or class name). Then you could easily jump between areas you have been touching.

In the interest of there being partial solutions/workarounds now (which don't invalidate the ideas!), a couple comments:

In the preferences you can turn on invisible characters, which would show tabs and make this a little easier to see.

The next beta will save cursor and scroll positions upon document close and restore on open. So that's one bookmark :slight_smile:.

Whisk does support the macOS versions system via the 'File > Revert To > Browse All Versions…' menu item. There's no nice diffing though... personally I love working with Xcode's 2up diff view while editing everything.

Is there a way to turn this off? Or any other control for how often it saves etc?

I don’t think you can control on a fine-grained basis, but see this article on techniques for turning it off or modifying the autosave delay:

You’ll need to replace the bundle identifier for Whisk’s of com.tumult.Whisk

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