Setting Up HTML Kit

The Setting Up HTML Kit section of Iron Spider is intended to help all those who, like myself, took one look at the staggering array of options contained in HTML Kit, fell off their chair and, in a dazed stupor, stumbled away from their computer in order to find a safe quiet place to catch their breath.

Although the HTML Kit online documentation is helpful, the literally hundreds of ways to configure what I have termed the 'Rolls Royce' of freeware HTML editors defies the creation of a step-by-step tutorial that tells you exactly what to do instead of how to do it. For instance, I can show you exactly how to select any one of 137 different flavors of ice cream but this won't take you any closer to deciding which one is the best flavor. Therefore what I'm presenting here is not really a help file but rather a configuration plan which will show you what I did to make HTML Kit work for me.

How It All Came About

HTML Kit permits you to save and reload certain settings, however this process doesn't remind you how you made those settings in the first place. So after getting lost numerous times during my quest for "the perfect HTML Kit setup", I thought to make a record of the settings that I particularly liked. Hence, this tutorial started out as a simple text file containing some personal configuration notes. It was essentially a compilation of my user preferences (and how I made them) and was culled from spending hours hunting through the ginormous list of options in HTML Kit and figuring out what did what largely by trial and error.

Eventually my text file of user preferences grew to be quite extensive, and being an experienced web page author, I decided it would be easier to convert it into several web pages so that I could quickly navigate around it using hyperlinks. This now gave me the option to hit what I called the 'panic button' (Reset Settings) with reckless abandon because I knew I could just use my hyperlinked configuration plan to reimplement all my preferences without any searching around.

By this point, configuring HTML Kit had almost become like a hobby as I explored the seemingly endless possibilities which included customizing the toolbars, using the Favorites tab, making a new Actions Bar, setting up keyboard shortcuts and of course, the big daddy of HTML Kit optimizations, creating plugins. My initial fear (*chuckle*) quickly turned into fascination and it goes without saying that HTML Kit had now become my new HTML editor of choice.

And hence this tutorial was born.

By publishing these notes online, I hope I can help others to wade through the plethora of ways to set up HTML Kit and to quickly and easily get from point A -bedazzled by the default user interface- to point B - begin making first class web pages with a highly customized user interface.

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If you don't have HTML Kit yet, then GO NOW to the HTML Kit home page and download it for free. And when I say 'free', I mean absolutely free, i.e. NO SELF-DESTRUCTING AFTER 30 DAYS, NO NAG SCREENS and NO DISABLED FEATURES.

I also recommend that you download the Plugins Generator which will allow you to make user-defined buttons on the HTML Kit program interface.

Okay let's assume that you've got all your necessary goodies and you're raring to go. Alrighty then without further ado...


Let's git busy ~>