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Olla

My take on the disappearance of problems...

I cannot claim much, Olla just appeared as a working design in my mind. There were some dots to connect, but basically Olla was born in a pain free way. I remember murmuring Thank You, not really knowing who or what I was thanking. But I knew what I was thanking for: A brilliant new editing system that would have an irresistable appeal to people not much lower on the IQ scale than me, and not much higher either..

copyq geany

How it started

After proving to myself that the concept was feasable, I started looking for a clipboard, more versatile than Clipit, the default clipboard manager in MX Linux. Luckily I soon discovered CopyQ. It is cross-platform, open source, available also for ARM. What a totally amazing program that is! It seems it can be modelled any way you want. Its developers call it "fairly easy", but it took the better part of a Saturday afternoon, before it started looking and behaving the way I wanted. Now it is just a menu or toolbar and it no longer 'listens' to copy-activities, it does not keep a history, does not put the selected item on top. What makes it unique is that as soon as you select an item from the list and hit the Enter key, the item is copied and pasted in Geany exactly where the active cursor is! ( More accurately: it copies to the window that last had focus...and exactly where that focus was)

I've given it three tabs: one for the html-tags, one for templates I use to start either a new html page, a new blog-page, or a new blog entry, and one for Lorem ipsum: one paragraph and two paragraphs. Both the templates and the lorem texts are also pasted into Geany just by selecting them in the CopyQ toolbar and pressing the Enter key.

For the html-tags I tried to get all the essentials in, with the exception maybe of the bottom 3 or 4 items, which I added because there was still some space left in the window.. they could be easily deleted and replaced by other tags. In fact the list could be made much longer, but that would introduce constant scrolling, something I wanted to avoid.
I fully realize ''bold'' and ''strong'' have the same result. Same for ''italic'' and ''emphesis''. For myself bold and italic would be enough, their tags are short and sweet, but w3schools sees differences...

One thing to keep in mind is that CopyQ is not "married" to Geany. It will paste to the window that last had focus. The downside of this is that your tag could end up in the wrong place if you're somewhat careless. But the good news is: you're free to use your editor of choice!
All in all I'm quite excited about this approach. Starting a new page: just select the html template and start writing between the body tags. Writing a html page has now become extremely simple and pleasant.. just select the tag you need, press Enter ( or doubleclick the selection) and...presto, there you have it.

copyq-menu



heading 1
heading 2
heading 3
heading 4
paragraph
span
div
link
link opening in new tab
image
video
bold
italic
strong
emphesis

blockquote

unordered list
ordered list
list item
line break
horizontal ruler:

class
identity
mark
strike

abbreviation
html comment



[Edit March 2021]: some changes to the layout: see this part of the documentation for details):

copyq-narrow

Apart from using a mouse or trackpad, you can use the keyboard to navigate in CopyQ: the up and down arrows to walk through the tags, the left/right arrows for going through the tabs.

See the Olla documentation for a complete overview and howto:

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