Text Editor: PSPad

In many fields of endeavor involving a computer a good text editor goes a long way in making your job easier. Formatting offsets and input files for various (often outdated) programs can be a headache even with the right tool, much less the wrong (i.e. notepad). I've tried several over the years. I was using Super Notetab for several years, but recently having switched over to PSPad. PSPad has most the features that I liked in Super Notetab and a host of others. Both programs have the following features:

• tabbed interface for editing multiple documents
• multi-file search/replace

PSPad is written to be friendly to programmers. To this end it has syntax hi-lighting and syntax completion for most widely used languages. The user can also add up to five custom defined syntaxes. This is done fairly straightforwardly by defining a syntax (.ini) file. Syntax completion is initiated by pressing ctl+J. If you are feeling a little more adventurous there is also a context file (.def) which allows you to define some of the nuances and structure of the language and also to add some helpful comments to the syntax completion. With the addition of the .def file you get slightly different syntax completion by pressing ctl+SPACE.

You don't need to be dealing with a programming language for syntax coloring to be helpful. If there is one program you deal with a lot, you can just throw the keywords into a syntax file and the syntax highlighting makes the files much more readable and it's easier to catch mistakes.

PSPad also has macros. You specify a compiler or external program to run a certain file type. It can also automatically read a log file generated by the compiler or program. It has several selections modes: normal, column, and line. This is useful for extracting different bits from your file.

My only real complaints about the program are the limit of five custom file types and the print header. Sometimes you would like the filename and date printed on whatever file you have. The header, while optional, is not customizable. This wouldn't be a problem, except the footer (included if you select the header) says "PSPad Editor Version ..." and also lists the computer user's name. It seems an odd selection of footer content.

Screen shot of PSPad

Other text editors that may be worth looking at: Super Notetab, ConTEXT, Crimson Editor (no longer developed as of 2004), and TextPad.

First posting on random Windows software

I use several pieces of software in my day to day work that greatly enhance my productivity. I thought I would start my first blog off by hi-lighting several of these tools in hopes that someone out there finds them useful. I use both Windows and Linux, but do the majority of my work on Windows, so most of the software covered will be for Windows.