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Nudge 2.7

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@Chris-Keene Chris-Keene released this 18 Sep 17:26
· 2 commits to main since this release
v2.7
7e58412

A small Mac app for adjusting self-contained HTML presentations and reports without coming back to a code editor for every tweak.

Two modes, switched with ⌘E:

  • Wording — click any text in the live preview and type, and set how those words look: size, alignment, weight and colour.
  • Layout — click any element and adjust its size, spacing, position or order.

Installing

  1. Download Nudge-2.7.zip and unzip it.
  2. Drag Nudge into Applications.
  3. Double-click it. macOS will refuse and say it cannot check it for malicious software. Open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, and click Open Anyway next to Nudge. You only do this once.

Apple silicon Macs running macOS 13 (Ventura) or later. About 1 MB — there is no bundled runtime, it is just AppKit and WebKit.

Why it doesn't just use the browser's copy of the page

Almost every "edit HTML visually" tool sets contenteditable and reads back outerHTML. These files run their own JavaScript, so serialising the DOM bakes the current state into the file permanently: save while viewing slide 3 and every other slide gets a hidden attribute. The deck is destroyed.

Nudge never serialises a DOM. It scans the original file with an offset-tracking tokeniser, renders the real unmodified file in a WebKit view, aligns the two sequences, and on save splices your new text into those byte ranges back to front. Everything you did not edit is preserved byte for byte: CSS, JavaScript, indentation, comments, attribute order, entity spelling.

Safety

⌘R shows every pending edit, old against new, before anything is written. Every save leaves a timestamped copy in ~/Library/Application Support/Nudge/Backups. Smart quotes and text substitution are switched off, so nothing silently turns a hyphen into an em dash.

Caveats

A personal project and a work in progress. It is not signed with a paid Apple developer certificate, hence the first-launch step above. Layout changes are written as inline declarations on the element you selected, so they never restyle the other fourteen slides — but review your file before you send it anywhere.

The guide is attached, and there is more detail at https://chriskeene.me/nudge

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