BBCeditor

[smaragdus]

Preamble
While preparing new posts I have lost my drafts several times for various reasons- log-in time-outs, accidentally closed browser tab or browser, browser crash. In such cases I have to start it all over again. I was usually working in browsers because I didn't know a single Bulletin Board Code editor. Several days ago I discovered by chance a BBCode editor which happened to be both capable and portable- BBCeditor. It is open source to boot. It has been mentioned before but I think that it deserves its own thread. It is most likely abandoned but for me it works fine and it has several advantages to forums built-in tools- faster preview, saving projects (it uses its own BBC format), export to MHT.

Synopsis

BBCeditor is a simple editor for BBcode which allows you to easily create a collection of posts for various forum boards. The biggest advantage of this editor is that you can always write some nice responses when your Internet connection is down and post them later into your favourite board. You can keep your writing history in this way.

Features

• Snippets feature - allows to quick insert favourite phrases on Ctrl+Space;
• live preview - texts can be automatically shown as they will be seen in your web browser;
• SpellChecker - keeps you safe from spelling errors;
• tags wizards - insert your tables, lists and images easily;
• advanced drag'n'drop handling - define how text files should be treated (i.e. CSV as tables);
• shortcuts and menus - context menus and shortcuts allow you to format your code in more efficiently;
• custom toolbar size - user's icons themes support;
• custom buttons - define your own tags and create toolbar buttons for them;
• preview schemes - Preview control uses styles.css file located in application's directory so you can change its content easily;
• two parsing engines - choose whichever you want;
• documents preview in Open file dialogue;
• CSS style chooser;
• Inline mode for easier editing;
• More info

Links
Website
Website
Publisher
Publisher
DonationCoder Forum
Softpedia

Downloads
Direct download links for BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0:

• Binary
• Code

Images

BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 - program:



BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 - settings:



BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 - shortcuts:



BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 - spell check:



BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 - program in action:



BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 - about:



BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 - tray:



Portability
BBCeditor is portable by design- settings are saved in INI file (config.ini) inside program folder. There is a log file (BBCeditor.exe.log) in AppData but it is not created by BBCeditor but by CLR (Common Language Runtime).

Instructions

• Download the archive (bbceditor_1135b.zip);
• Extract the archive to a folder of your choice;
• Run the executable (BBCeditor.exe);

Requirements
BBCeditor should work under Windows XP or higher, it requires .NET Framework 2.0 or higher.

License
BBCeditor is freeware

This application is FREE for any purpose.

and open source but (as far as I know) the license type is not specified.

Note
I prepared this post using BBCeditor, screen:



The program is tiny (738 KB - archive, 2.02 MB - unpacked) and relatively light (under Windows 8 x64 it uses about 90 MB of RAM).
Most likely BBCeditor is abandoned. Yet I may contact the developer suggesting some tiny enhancements.
BBCeditor may be useful to regular forum posters who prefer to work and save their drafts off-line.
I find export to MHT useful.
The spell check is not exactly to my liking.
To enable Undo/Redo feature open your config.ini file and add UseUndo=1 line. You can also change default Undo size (20) by using MaxUndo=XX (where XX is number) variable.

Alternatives

• WYSIWYG BBCode Editor
  • Website - Unavailable
  • Website - Internet Archive
  • Project - CodePlex - archived
  • The Portable Freeware - forum
  • Softpedia

Details
File details for BBCeditor version 1.1.35.0 (released on 2012-08-13):

==

Name: bbceditor_1135b..zip
File Size: 755620 Byte(s) (737.91 KB)
MD5: 789850b09314743b8ee7909712824fa1
SHA1: 635ceeb88f83b835a75eb66266fc5800e78a8cdf
SHA256: 44d08143f766f14f0ee10c5d5d1e86b721103ae3058be1fac6896b70c2dc95a4
SHA384: db204cd69cdfd97181d4a27a41fc6593cd3e8ea960c74d2424508613924be346908fdf63f4c92fa34ac81ad03d578b91
SHA512: 68972a0ffd7600d394cf0156002706780e4ccfc2466ab68274a68b98402b42d08c051b87863714dc6ee1aeb5f771b88733d2c4fe60a81891349108a20eab1643
RIPEMD160: e37fa5f4aa2fbe9be0c97a9d5943d6c0183868c7

==

[shnbwmn]

Great find. A lot of forums still use phpBB and I find the built-in editor a bit tedious sometimes.

Edit: At the end of the WYSIWYG BBCode Editor post webfork mentioned SCEditor. Looks like a nifty online alternative. Link-adding and lists are much easier now. It can be downloaded and used offline in the browser.

[Midas]

Great suggestions, peeps. I'll have to try them soon.

[smallhagrid]

Does anyone know if this or something like it is able to also strip down an already posted chunk - removing all the tags such that it becomes plain text, as in for note keeping ??
I used to have a program with a strip HTML function but I can't find it.

[FileHandler]

Does anyone know if this or something like it is able to also strip down an already posted chunk - removing all the tags such that it becomes plain text, as in for note keeping ??

I used to have a program with a strip HTML function but I can't find it. Anyway:

• Usually just copying and pasting text from an entry into Notepad++ works fine for me.
• You can open up the post in SeaMonkey's Composer tool and use the editor function to remove/reformat the HTML elements with indentation, bullets, etc.
• You can use any number of programs that support regex: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/580 ... -html-tags

Nirsoft has a tool to strip whole files from tags:
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/htmlastext.html

Similar alternative: http://wizbrother.com/tools/html2text.html

I used to have an Autohotkey script that could convert it on the fly, via the clipboard, during copy and paste operations, but that was years ago, I don't recall the name of the little helper, you might find something on https://autohotkey.com/boards/

Concerning the original topic: To avoid losing my typed text for forums and BBC, I type my messages in a local text editor that I call up via Text Editor Anywhere: https://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=2188

[smallhagrid]

Let me try & better 'splain what I meant - as perhaps my description lacked clarity:
When posting at some forum - after hitting 'submit' I belatedly realize that I wanted to save that text as a note via TXT file.

Right then I have 2 obvious choices=>
1 - copy/paste the post as it appears, but it likely has truncated URLs showing, or:
2 - Open the editor and copy the text in full, but with all that

Code: Select all

 [b][/b], [url][/url] 

and so forth festooning it - so I then remove that excess manually.

It is my thought that those are called bbcodes or tags - but they are not HTML tags as I know those to be.

It is that excess which wuld be nice to strip as a function, somehow.

Thanks.

[digtoise]

Do you have the latest source code @smaragdus ? I downloaded the source code from the link you provided

This is what I got

Code: Select all

[assembly: AssemblyTitle( "BBCeditor" )]
[assembly: AssemblyDescription( "BBCode editor - test build" )]
[assembly: AssemblyConfiguration( "" )]
[assembly: AssemblyCompany( "fenixproductions" )]
[assembly: AssemblyProduct( "BBCeditor" )]
[assembly: AssemblyCopyright( "Copyright © fenixproductions 2011" )]
[assembly: AssemblyTrademark( "" )]
[assembly: AssemblyCulture( "" )]
[assembly: ComVisible( false )]
[assembly: AssemblyVersion( "1.0.30.0" )]
[assembly: AssemblyFileVersion( "1.0.30.0" )]
[assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguageAttribute( "en" )]

[Midas]

The "code" link in Smaragdus OP makes my Firefox throw a "File not downloaded. Potential security risk." exception.

But if I proceed with the download anyway I get a 'bbceditor_1135b_src.zip', which I assume is the source code you're looking for, digtoise...