This page gives an overview of the Editorial UI and also contains some useful tips and tricks to help you get the most out of it.
The app is organized in three main panels that you can show and hide by swiping left and right.
Editorial is optimized for writing Markdown. If you’re new to this, or if you need a little refresh on its basic syntax, please refer to the short Markdown Primer.
In the file browser you can view a list of your files and folders, and create new documents. When you are in the root folder, you can switch between files that are only on this device (Local) and files in your Dropbox, by switching between the corresponding tabs at the top.
When you first switch to the Dropbox tab, you’ll be asked to link your Dropbox account with Editorial. If you have the official Dropbox app installed, this will switch to it and ask you to authorize access. Otherwise, a login dialog will be shown within Editorial.
By default, Editorial syncs all the files in the Dropbox folder /Apps/Editorial. If you want to use a different folder, you can change this in the settings.
The bottom toolbar lets you to add a new document (+ button), and change the sort order (by date or by name).
To delete or move files, tap the Edit button at the top. This allows you to select multiple files and then choose the action you want to perform at the bottom.
Tip
On the iPad, you can quickly access a list of recently-used documents directly from the editor by tapping and holding the document list button.
The editor is where you’ll spend most of your time. It is optimized for editing Markdown and plain text. When you’re writing in Markdown, you can see a basic preview right within the text. For example, surrounding a word with an asterisk (*) makes it italic, two asterisks make it bold. If you prefer editing your Markdown without any highlighting, you can turn this feature off, or adjust it for individual elements in the settings. For a full preview, you can switch to the preview panel.
The editor is extensible with a very flexible system of drag’n’drop workflows and Python scripts. To learn more about these, please refer to the chapters Scripting Editorial with Python and Building Workflows.
Snippets are little pieces of text that you can insert quickly by typing abbreviations, or by selecting them from the snippet list that is available on the extended keyboard.
A snippet is basically the same as a workflow with a single Replace Selected Text action, but it is much faster to create.
Snippets can contain any of the built-in variables, so you can use placeholders for the current date, selected text, clipboard contents, or even the title of the page currently loaded in the browser panel. You can also define where the caret should be after inserting the snippet.
Note
The bookmarks bar is only available on the iPad.
You can use bookmarks for quick access to documents, workflows, and websites.
If the bookmarks bar isn’t already visible, you can show it by tapping the triangle in the top-lefthand corner of the editor.
Technically, a bookmark is just a shortcut for opening a URL, but because Editorial has an extensive URL scheme of its own, they can not only be used for visiting websites, but also for triggering workflows or opening often-used documents.
Tap the bookmark icon to show your bookmarks as a list that you can rearrange. Tapping on the + button creates a new bookmark with an empty URL and title that you can fill in. While you can construct a bookmark URL by hand, the Add Bookmark panel also contains shortcuts for commonly-used editorial:// URLs, for example to open the current document, or to run one of your workflows.
Tip
You can edit an existing bookmark more quickly by just tapping and holding its title in the bookmarks bar.
Editorial extends the standard iOS keyboard with an additional row of special characters that are often used in Markdown. Using it should be straightforward if you’re familiar with the standard iOS keyboard, but the extra row has some additional functionality you might not be aware of:
You can reveal a collection of four different accessory panels with a left swipe gesture in the editor. These panels contain helpful additional tools that are not directly related to editing text. Depending on your preferences, you might not use all of them.
When you’re editing a Markdown document, this panel shows an HTML preview of your current document. It is refreshed automatically when you show it.
The console shows output from Python scripts (see Scripting Editorial with Python) and can be used to enter Python commands interactively.
Even if you’re not interested in the programming part, you might find it useful as a calculator – just try entering some mathematical expressions like 12 * 4 + 5. It is also used by the Console Output workflow action.
You are viewing this panel right now. :)
You can use the built-in browser for quick research, or as a helper in your workflows and scripts.
In workflows, you can invoke it with the Open URL action, and in Python scripts with the webbrowser module. You can also access the current URL, title, and text selection in the browser panel with built-in workflow variables.
The browser is also used for opening web bookmarks. It has its own set of bookmarks that are separate from the editor’s bookmarks bar, but otherwise function similarly. If your workflows use the browser feature, you might want to add a bookmark for triggering it in the browser’s bookmarks menu. Javascript bookmarklets are also supported.
You can access Editorial’s settings from the editor, using the gear button. On the iPhone, you’ll find the settings button in the file browser. The settings are divided into multiple categories, described below.
If you haven’t already linked Editorial to your Dropbox account, you can do this from here. When your account is linked, additional settings will appear. You can change the folder Editorial syncs with, or reset the sync, if you’re experiencing problems.
You can launch Editorial from other apps using the editorial:// URL scheme. Apart from just launching the app, you can open an existing file in your library, create a new file with a given name, and run workflows.
The general pattern of an Editorial URL is this:
editorial://<action>/<filename>?root=<dropbox|local>&selection=<from-to>&command=<command name>&input=<command input>
action can be open or new
filename is either the name of the file to open (if action is open), or the name of the new file to create (if action is new). If a file with the given name already exists, a numeric suffix is automatically appended.
root can be dropbox or local. If omitted, local is assumed.
command optionally specifies an editor command (workflow) by name that should be executed after opening or creating the file. If there are multiple workflows with the same name, the first one is executed. You can also leave out the action and filename parameters to execute a command without opening or creating a file, for example:
editorial://?command=My%20Command.
input optionally specifies the input for the first action in the workflow that is run with the command parameter.
selection is an optional parameter for setting the initial selected text range when opening or creating a file. It is specified as from-to, for example 0-10 to select the first 10 characters. The to part can be omitted if you don’t want to select any text, but scroll to a specific position. If you want to scroll to the end of the text, you can just use a very large number for from. Selections that go beyond the length of the text will automatically be capped.
In addition to the app-specific parameters above, Editorial also supports the x-callback-url standard. x-callback parameters only have an effect when the command parameter is used to run a workflow.
Starting with Editorial 1.1, there are additional URL schemes for detecting the installed version from other apps. For example, with version 1.1, the additional schemes editorial-v100:// and editorial-v110:// are supported. A different app could check for these schemes to detect if a specific update is installed, in case it depends on features that weren’t available in older versions.
The behavior of the version-specific schemes is equivalent to the default (editorial://) scheme.