Geek Software of the Week: PSpad!
I seem to be on a “quest” to find the best text editor. Do you ever check your posts to see who links to them? Well, I do occasionally, and I found that someone had linked to my recent post about the list of software that I recommend for all Windows users. He agreed with all of them pretty much EXCEPT the text editor. He recommended his favorite, which was Jedit. I downloaded and played with Jedit, and it was OK… it had some things I really liked. But, being a Java application, it was a mite slow. Also, I had to download and install four plugins to get the features that I really wanted. However, in a forum discussing Jedit, I found a reference to this week’s Geek Software of the Week, and my new text editor… ta da! PSPad!
PSpad – Text and Programmer’s Editor
PSpad has all the features I was looking for and more! Check them out (…not the full list!)
— work with projects
— work on several documents at the same time (MDI)
— Save desktop session to later reopen all open files
— FTP client – you can edit files directly from the web
— macro recorder to record, save and load macros
— search and replace in files
— text difference with color-coded differences highlighted
— templates (HTML tags, scripts, code templates…)
— installation contains templates for HTML, PHP, Pascal, JScript, VBScript, MySQL, MS-Dos, Perl,…
— syntax highlighting auto set by file type
— user-defined highlighters for exotic environments
— auto correction
— intelligent internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla
— full HEX editor
— call external programs, different for each environment
— external compiler with catch command output, log window, log parser for each environment for “IDE” effect
— color syntax highlight printing and print preview
— integrated HTML TiDy library for formatting and checking HTML code, conversion to CSS, XML, XHTML
— integrated free version of top CSS editor TopStyle Lite
— export with highlight to RTF, HTML, TeX format into file or clipboard
— column block select, bookmarks, line numbers, …
— reformat and compress HTML code, tags char case change
— line sorting with ability to sort on defined column, with option to drop duplicates
— ASCII chart with HTML entities
— Code explorer for Pascal, INI, HTML, XML, PHP, and more in future
— spell checker
— internal web browser with APACHE support (this is VERY cool!)
— matching bracket highlighting