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Simple html Editor????

I want a text editor that I can use to jot down notes, and write documents. Basically I'm looking for a tool to be able to replace a lab book.

Of all things the first most important requirement is that the files I create need to be in some very standard, open source format so that 8+ years from now, they still work fine. The second requirement is that it's easy and quick to use.

For bonus points (and this is where I get hung up on), I want it to be able to have basic formatting abilities like adding pictures (preferably via a paste rather then linking files), and making tables and spreadsheets. I also what to make sure that I have only ONE stylesheet so that all the formatting always looks the same. I'm also really keen on the file format being html. Of all the formats, this one offers all the flexibility and compatibility I need. But the final requirement/issue is that the html code be very clean and minimal, and not the uglybarf that microsoft would produce.

So what are the options that I have seen so far:

• Bloated word processors like Word or Open Office
• Online tools like Evernote and google docs
• Text based tools like vim, editplus

I like the bloated software because of all the products I have used, they are the easiest to create files with. Adding images, charts, etc. is always really easy. The problem is reviewing the files later. With word for example, it's a really bad tool to use if your document has lots of images. It can take forever for word to draw out all of the pictures, and if you want to save to html, then a very small file ends up being massive with all of the extra code that is created.

Evernote has been helpful in keeping notes because of it's simplicity, but it's user interface is very much lacking in ease of use, and while it's really easy to go through all of your docs, I would rather have them locally in the event that they are business work and can't be stored "beyond the firewall".

Text editors are really great in the speed to take notes, but the lack of formatting kind of drop them out of the running. Sure I could use them to write raw html files, and I have with bluefish, but that goes against the speed requirement.

So what's a dude to do? Couldn't there be a basic editor, that was not to huge, thats file format was html, and that used a standard, single style sheet for all formatting?

I did see some other tools that looked interesting. Here's what I have found so far:

• CKEditor: Very close to what I'm looking for, but its for websites, (not standalone files) and it does not have the "paste" capability when dealing with images.

P4 Merge is TIT!!!

Seriously, there is no better dif utility out there then perforce's P4 Merge.

Take two files, and see what the differences are between them. Really useful for changes to code, router configs, or in this case apache httpd.conf files.

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