Xano's text template editor is cramped by default, but disabling the default extension and enabling state change gives you a much larger, resizable workspace. Perfect if you're pasting long prompts or complex templates.
So I'm a big fan of Xano's new text template editor, which is pretty great down here. It allows you to, you know, edit text in— and you can go send off to prompts, you can use it to format emails, you can use it for all sorts of good stuff. Now my big complaint about it though is it was kind of built on the same bones as the expression engine, and the expressions inside would be sort of this one-line thing. So it was this So most expressions tend to be relatively small and concise, but the templates are huge. And so what I find is that we get ourselves into a bit of trouble when we're working with these templates. In fact, let me just remove the extension here. I'm gonna show you what I mean by that. So if I turn off the extension for a second and I just refresh, you'll notice there's no extension here in the corner. And what we will get is something that looks like this, right? So I click into this, I click into this, I get this little box here. Now the trouble with having a little box is that when I start to say I want to, you know, go build out a prompt like I'm doing for my, you know, mental model work here. Let's see, I'm just going to take some stuff I have from Claude as a suggested prompt and copy this and paste this over here. Right. And now what I actually want to do is paste in the bullet list. And bullet list is actually gonna look like something much bigger, which is, let's see, I'll bring that over here. And then I'm going to use my bullet list. Da, da, da, da, da. And I'm gonna copy all of these things. And I paste this here. And then, you know, so I get a lot of stuff, but like I'm starting to really scroll through. Because what we often are doing as we start to build these things, we're building really big pieces of text. And we're trying to squeeze it into this relatively small window. Now, like I say, I think the window is wrong tool for the job. So what I did— so what we now have with the state change extension, and you get to have too, is instead of having this little thing— I'm going to say update and close, and I'll say save here. Uh, now I'm going to say in extensions, instead I can just— if I have the state change extension on, uh, and I were to refresh, uh, it will actually resize that window for me. So now we're going to get improved quality of life of being able to control this in a much better, uh, fashion. So now if I were to Scroll down here, I can take a look at my template engine. I click on that and click on this, and then you see it actually becomes much, much bigger. I get use of a lot more of the space on the screen in a way that XAML doesn't necessarily provide. I always have the shrink button so I can go back to the view that I had before, but I actually find this much bigger view to be super, super, super helpful to be able to modify things I find to be most important in here. The way I was raised as a data scientist is you want to give the biggest view to your data, and the data definitely is the text here. And this allows me to do far more interesting, complicated stuff with, uh, with my Xano. Uh, let me know what you think about it, put stuff in the comments, and I'll talk to you again soon.
