Hacking at 0300

I use the WordPress HTML editor exclusively, with the Text Control plugin with no formatting, so the posts contain exactly the markup I want. The editor comes with "Quick Tag" buttons, that let you insert HTML tags with one click, and allows you to add custom buttons. So, for all my code samples, I want to have a <pre> button, I just create a javascript file (say, called quicktags.custom.js):

QTags.addButton('pre', 'pre', '<pre>', '</pre>\n');

And include it with the following PHP either in a plugin or my theme functions.php:

if(is_admin()){
	// it's an admin page. Add the custom editor buttons
	wp_register_script('customeditor', plugins_url('quicktags.custom.js', __FILE__), array('quicktags')); // this script depends on 'quicktags'
	wp_enqueue_script('customeditor');
}

And now I have a button that inserts <pre></pre> pairs. But there's much more you can do.