So I’ve been working on this Whoa thing for a while now, and I’ve never really tried to explain—even to myself—what exactly it is. I’m not sure I could do that now either. But I can say what it looks like right now, and I can lay out some plans I have for the near future.

A lot of early inspiration came from Jake Albaugh’s self coding pen.

In its current state, Whoa looks nothing like that. Currently whoa is kinda just an expansion of Markdown. By that I mean that I can write whoa posts using all the features of Markdown, and then some.

So here is what drafting a post looks like, next to the rendered version.

Here is what whoa does for me. I draft a post with the extension .whoa. This post looks like this. /*// ⚠️ ⚠🔮 ️be smarter about these things */

It can be kinda hard to differentiate between what whoa does and what the blog structure I set up does. Ideally I would have them less closely coupled, but that isn’t pressing.

So there are kinda 3 layers that make it all happen.

1. whoa-theme and whoa-language-support

2. whoa-loader

3. whoa-components

Let’s go through them 1 by 1.

1. whoa-theme and whoa-language-support

These are two Visual Studio Code Extensions. One thing you can do in VS Code—and some other text editors is create your own language grammars. whoa-language-support is what does that.

Language grammars are how you are able to get things like syntax highlighting and bracket matching, among many others. Out of the box, VS Code comes installed with a JavaScript grammar and some others, but of course, every programming language needs a grammar! People are using new and obscure languages all the time, and you don’t want to have to rely on the text-editor folks to support your language. It’s fairly easy to create your own language extension by looking through VS Code docs and language extensions that others have open-sourced, like the elm one.

whoa-theme is just a simple VS Code theme extension. This colorizes the scopes that have been set up by the language grammar.

2 UNFINISHED. Got hungry

Components

Tangents

Probably the component I’ve put the most time into. /*// ⚠️ ⚠🔮 ️be smarter about these things */
But if it does go off page and then maybe gets covered, you can just click on it and read the contents in a popup.

Search Bars

Revisions

Some bad text that you should hover over. And some that hovering over doesn’t do nothin.

Normatives

I should find a new job. Now look over in the notes to the left 👈.

Redactions

Here is some text that maybe I don’t want you to see, at least not without some effort.

Word Choice

I often can’t decide what word to use. And sometimes I have doubts about whether the word I use is a real word and the befitting word.

Damn I really need more components.

Maybe. Or I might just want to write more. For one. Then I’ll see what I really need.