Thanks to the support of many people, HTML-Kit has produced more than 440 plugins to help newcomers as well as experienced web developers code faster while mainting full control over their HTML code. The main software component behind this is the HTML-Kit Build 292 which provided a stable core that could be extended over time.
While HTML-Kit's humble plugins interface has continued to bring new tools and some surprises along the way, there are some options that can't easily be added without changing parts of the core as well. The 'Editor window' is one of the parts that could benefit from a more extensible plugins interface. The 'Preview window,' for example, has been able to utilize multiple versions of Internet Explorer and Mozilla browser components side-by-side. The same should be made possible in the editor window, so that it'd be easier to use one of the excellent third-party components such as Scintilla, Vim-based and more as part of the plugins interface. This would make it easier to add filetype-specific features and syntax highlighting without having to reinstall the core build each time.
To get started, along with the interchangeable editor window as mentioned above the following features are in testing stage.
- Expanded ability to customize and add new syntax highlighters (for PHP 5 with Smarty, ASP.NET, etc.)
- Per-tag / per-function colors, so for example TABLE tags could have one color and DIV tags another
- Real-time split views inside the editor for viewing multiple sections of a document
- Automatic highlighting of matching ( ) { } [ ] pairs
- Code folding for temporarily hiding sections that aren't related to what's being edited
- Improved indentation with visual markers for keeping the look of code blocks consistent
So to get back to the new year's resolutions, these features are planned to be released shortly (Jan-2006) initially as an add-on that'd run on top of HTML-Kit. The first versions will be available to the registered users, plugin authors and contributors. Please note that timeframes are subject to change as is the case with software development, but this is now a resolution!