Workspaces, Collections, Project Manager: What? Why?

[mkoskim]

MawePy (Python/GTK mawe)

The earlier MawePY (Mawe written with Python and GTK) has two features not yet present in current MaweJS: (1) workspace, (2) project manager.

Workspace

MawePY is tabbed editor. The file tab is located at left side:

It stores the files opened in editor, and loads them when you restart the editor. This allows you to continue where you left last time.

Project manager

MawePY has some sort of project manager. When opening a file, you can choose if you use directory tree, or project scanner. Project scanner scans a given folder for .mawe (and older .moe, and even older .tex files) and lists them:

The project status info (status, deadline and so on) is stored in the story file head, from where it is extracted and shown in the list.

MaweJS

For MaweJS, I really want something similar, while also fixing the inconviences in the earlier implementation.

Tabbed editing

Yes, MaweJS should be a tabbed editor. The big question at the moment is, how to implement this tabbing? There are two main paths to consider:

1. Browser side tabbing: This is pretty straight-forward to understand. You create tabbed React element and manage its content.
2. Server side tabbing: As ElectronJS comes with full-featured Chrome browser, the second option would be implementing tabbed editor using the same principle as Chrome's tabs - they are all separate browser instances.

The option 2 is very tempting. It could made it possible to have external websites in the workspace! That would mean that you could have e.g. your GoogleDoc sketches loaded to the workspace, and you could edit them. It would be fantastic! It would not stop there. There are all sorts of web-based story outliners, world-building software and such, which you could directly utilize.

Workspaces

While tabbed editing is just fine, it would be really useful to have real, named workspaces which you can organize (add and remove files from them). I have stories which relate to each other, and I would like them to be opened when switching to that specific project. Also, as a Finnish speculative fiction writer, there are two annual writing competitions for which I'd like to create a workspace and collect candidates to it, e.g. "Portti 2023", "Portti 2024" and so on.

Collections

With named workspaces which you could organize and switch to, the next thing would be able to export that workspace as a collection. For example, I have set of stories related to generation ships, another set related to robots, and so on. I would like to collect them to a workspace, and export that workspace as a collection of stories (that is, stories combined to one RTF).

Story scanner

The main advantage in MawePy's project manager is that it scans .mawe files from a directory tree. It helps locating files. This is definitely the feature I want.

But I am not sure if it is useful to implement project manager like it is in MawePY. If we have multiple workspaces, we could set the deadline there. Also, the story status could be determined other ways, and/or it could be stored to workspace, not in the story itself.