TextPad: The Developer's Text Editor

Most professional web developers use a WYSIWYG content editor for creating web pages because it simplifies the task of formatting text, creating links to pages, selecting pages to edit, insuring that the local copy of the page is synchronized with the public copy of the page, and an array of other features which will really simply your job as a webmaster. However, there are times when you need to use a plain text editor either to manually edit the HTML, clean up imported or exported text, or for some other purpose.

Most PC's come equipped with NotePad and/or Wordpad, and it can be used for all of your simple text editing needs. However, Notepad and Wordpad are not very sophisticated but they are reliable for simple text editing operations. For more advanced text editing, you will need a programmer's text editor, which provides more sophisticated text manipulation.

The programmer's text editor I suggest you get comfortable with is TextPad®, and is an excellent text editor with all the advanced features of a professional developer's tool. Although not free, the evaluation copy never expires and therefore gives you plenty of time for evaluation. A "nag" screen will pop-up occasionally to remind you to purchase the product but the software won't disable or lose functionality. If later you decide that you can't live without it, then buy it. It is very reasonably priced and you really should support developers who create useful tools.

In later tutorials I will show you how to use some of the more advanced features like block editing and creating macros to make simple work of repetitive tasks.

Download and install TextPad® Now!

TextPad® is designed to provide the power and functionality to meet and exceed most of your editing requirements. It can edit files up to the limits of virtual memory, and it will work with the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows® 2000, Server 2003, XP and Vista. TextPad has been implemented according to the Windows XP user interface guidelines, so great attention has been paid to making it easy for both beginners and experienced users.

Here is a partial list of supported features:

Huge files can be edited, up to the limits of virtual memory.
Supports Universal Naming Convention (UNC) style names, and long file names with spaces.
CUA compliant keyboard commands.
English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish user interfaces.
A spelling checker with dictionaries in 10 languages.
Multiple files can be simultaneously edited, with up to 2 views per file.
Warm Start feature lets you restart exactly where you left off.
In addition to the usual cut, copy and paste capabilities, selected text can be case shifted and block indented, and characters, words and lines can be transposed. Cut and copied text can be appended to the clipboard, as well as replacing its contents.
Text can be automatically word-wrapped at the margin, or at a specified column, if it does not fit on a line. In this mode, text can be split into separate lines where wrapping occurs, or lines can be intelligently joined, preserving paragraphs.
OLE2 drag and drop editing for copying and moving text between documents.
Unlimited undo/redo capability. The undo buffer can be optionally cleared when a file is saved, or by using the Mark Clean command.
Block (column) selection mode, and visible display of tabs and spaces.
A keystroke macro recorder, with up to 16 active macros.
Sorting, using up to 3 keys.
Text can be automatically aligned and indented, relative to the previous line, to aid block indentation.
The right mouse button pops up an in-context menu.
The cursor can be constrained to the text, or can be positioned freely in the document view.
Toolbar with fly-by usage hints, and an active status bar.
A powerful search/replace engine using UNIX-style regular expressions, with the power of editor macros. Sets of files in a directory tree can be searched, and text can be replaced in all open documents at once.
Visible bookmarks can be placed on individual lines, and on all occurrences of a search pattern. Bookmarked lines can be cut, copied or deleted.
A built in file manager for fast file copying, renaming, deleting etc.
Print previewing, and printing with customizable headers/footers and page breaks.
Viewer for binary files using a hexadecimal display format.
Built in file comparison utility, and up to 16 user-defined tools with argument macros.
Hypertext links from file search and user tool output to the relevant source line.
DDE interface to other tools, such as MS Visual C++. The editor detects when an open file has been modified by another tool, and prompts you to reopen it.

Download and install TextPad® Now!

After you download and install TextPad, launch the application and take some time to get comfortable with the interface. Learn how to create and save a simple text file, close down the application, launch the application, locate and edit a previously saved text file, etc.

Launch TextPad and Select File->New.

This will put you into a blank text document. Enter some text to play with.

Select File->Save As.

By default, TextPad will save this text document into your Documents folder - which is fine for now. Later we will want to navigate to our local web site folder to save the text document.

Shut down (close) the TextPad editor.

Startup the TextPad editor and select File->Open.

Locate your saved document and double click the file name to load it into TextPad. Make some more changes and save the file again. Repeat the previous steps until you are comfortable starting the application, creating a new document, adding text into a new document, saving the document, shutting down the TextPad application, re-editing an existing text document, etc.

Practice makes perfect and it is essential you spend some time mastering your new text editor. When you have control of the basics, you'll be ready to move on to more powerful text editing operations such block editing, developing and running macros, and using regular expressions for searching and replacing text in a single or multiple documents.