The editor

Stable

The three panels, the status bar, and how live compiling behaves.

The editor lives at /editor. It first opens a blocking project chooser: continue this browser's saved project, create a named project from an available starter, or load a project file. The chooser has no close action until a project has opened successfully. After that, the workspace has three panels and a status bar:

┌────────────────────────┬────────────────────────┐
│  CODE                  │  PREVIEW               │
│  your Goblin script,   │  one card, or all of   │
│  squiggles on errors   │  them — front/back     │
├────────────────────────┴────────────────────────┤
│  SPREADSHEET — one tab per Sheet:               │
│  columns from your code, rows from you          │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  9 cards · 0 problems · 0 excluded rows         │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Code (top left)#

Your Goblin script, in a real code editor (Monaco) with syntax highlighting and autocomplete. Suggestions appear as you type (or on Ctrl+Space) and fit where your cursor is: your column names inside [brackets], the properties a block accepts, size presets, color names, enum cases after a ., and icon codes inside code: strings. Inside a Text or TextBox string, typing { offers color-scope and resolved-text alias helpers; after {alias:, the editor offers top-level lets that the compiler knows can resolve to Text. Suggestions come from your latest compile, so they keep working while the code is broken mid-edit — the moment a Sheet: declares a column, that column is offered everywhere it's legal. Errors appear as red squiggles where they happen, and the status bar counts how many.

Preview (top right)#

Your generated cards, live. Toggle Front/Back and Export PDF from the toolbar, and pick one of two views with the pair of icon buttons next to them:

Single card (the default) — one card, as large as the panel allows. The ‹ 3 / 18 › control steps through every card in the project, in the order the Card: blocks declare them, so the arrows carry you from the end of one deck into the start of the next. A line above the card says which deck you're in.
Grid — every card at once, grouped by the Card: block that made them, with a zoom slider for card size. Long decks scroll.

Turn on Row numbers in either view to place a high-contrast red badge over the current card—or every visible grid card—showing the one-based sheet row that generated it. The setting stays on when you switch views. These badges are preview aids only and never enter PDF output.

The zoom slider only appears in grid view; in single view the card is already sized to the panel, so making the panel bigger (drag the divider) is the zoom.

While your code has errors, the preview freezes on the last good result and shows an amber note saying so, instead of flickering or emptying. This is the single most important behaviour in the editor: you can break your code mid-thought and still see what you were working on.

Spreadsheet (bottom)#

One tab per Sheet: you declare in code. The columns come from your code; the rows are yours to fill.

Enum-typed columns become dropdowns.
A cell whose value doesn't fit its column flags red.
A brand-new, never-edited empty row renders dimmed and is excluded from the deck until you type into it — so adding a row doesn't spray errors before you can fill it in.
Your data survives schema edits. Rename a column in code (same position, same type) and its data comes with it.
Sheets can be renamed from the tab bar. Select a tab and use Rename, or double-click the tab. CardGoblin updates the Sheet: declaration and every Card's sheet: reference as one edit while preserving the rows. Renaming is disabled while the code is broken, and invalid names or collisions are rejected without changing the project.
Columns are resizable. Drag the right edge of a column header, or focus its resize handle and use the left/right arrow keys. Turn on Wrap text in the tab bar when you want long Text cells (such as card descriptions) to wrap and grow their rows vertically. Number and enum cells stay single-line, and turning wrapping off returns Text cells to the compact single-line view without changing their data.
The row number is editable. Click it and type a new position — the row moves there and every row between shifts to make room (typing 2 on row 10 of A..J yields A J B C D E F G H I; a number ≤ 0 or past the end clamps to the first or last row). Typing something that isn't a number, or the row's own current position, leaves the grid untouched. This number is exactly what [row] resolves to inside your templates — reordering rows in the grid is how you reorder what your cards print.

Status bar#

Total cards, code problems, flagged cells, and excluded rows — plus a stale indicator when the preview is showing an older render because the current code doesn't compile. To its right sit the editor's project-lifecycle controls:

Assets — opens the drawer of images uploaded from your machine (see Uploaded assets), with a count badge.
Export project — download the whole project as a portable file. To load one back, choose New / Open Project, then Load project file — see Project files.
Export Data — download one CSV row per generated card, including virtual columns — see Data export.
Project name — shows the active project's editable name. Choose Rename to edit it, then Save or Cancel.
New / Open Project — returns to the project chooser. Your current project remains active unless another project finishes opening.

Sign-in and sign-out are not editor controls. Administrator authentication lives on /admin.

The compile loop#

Everything recompiles about 300 ms after you stop typing. One pass does the whole pipeline:

your code ──► parse ──► check ──► generate ──► preview
your rows ──────────────────────────┘

Two rules make it feel stable rather than twitchy:

Keep last good. The preview shows the last render that succeeded; the grid's tabs and columns come from the last schema that compiled. Neither flickers while you're halfway through typing a block.
Per-card isolation. A data problem affects only the cards that touch it. The rest of the deck renders normally.

Saving your work#

The editor autosaves your code and rows to this browser and restores them when you come back — one save slot, one browser. For anything precious, export a project file too — it's a proper backup that travels.