Do More With Textpad

01/06/2008

The best part of Windows is Notepad. However, when it comes to doing real work in a text editor, I like most people find myself wishing I could do so much more. Enter Textpad. For people who do serious text editing in Windows, Textpad packs a punch when it comes to features and usability.

Overview

Textpad is a text editor. Text editors are used to edit plain text files, which don't contain things like bolding, italics, and underlining. Most commonly you will find a text editor in use when creating web pages. I've been using Textpad for a little over a year now and since making the switch from Notepad to Textpad, I wont go back. I've found that Textpad is far more feature rich than notepad and does many things that assist in my day to day usage of the program. Textpad as a whole gives you the ability to do a multitude of things without overwhelming you with a lot of buttons for options right at the get go.

By Default, Textpad opens up with the drop down menus, a toolbar, a document selector, a tool output, and the main window for the text. While this may seem like a lot, it is not overwhelming. The toolbars and drop down menus can be moved anywhere on the screen depending on where you prefer them and buttons can be added or subtracted depending on which functions you need available.

The Interface

The interface of Textpad was designed to keep things quick and easy for the things you do most often. Along the top of the screen as you open up more documents, it will open up a list of tabs that you can quickly select from. However, if you have long file names, this space could quickly get filled up and its usefulness degraded as you may only be able to get 3 or 4 documents up in the tab before it begins to push other tabs off the edge of the screen, where they are only accessible from the drop down arrow. A nice feature of the tabs is that you can rearrange them to be in an order that best suits you.

For those of you who need more documents open at one time, there is the document selector window. This will allow you to quickly switch between documents in a way similar to tabs, but you can show longer file names and a larger amount of files. If you aren't switching between a lot of documents, you may want to use the document selector space for something more useful. Part of the usefulness of Textpad is that most things can be moved around to better suit your needs.

You can also turn the Document Selector into an Explorer Tree to make it easier to navigate to files. This is great when you have files located all over your computer that you are opening. Alternatively, you can also click the tab to turn the document selector into the Clip Library. The Clip Library is a very useful tool that contains all the ANSI characters, which you can double click to insert into your file.

Tools To Make Life Easier

As a web designer, one of the things that I find very handy is that depending on what type of data you are coding and what language, Textpad will change the color of the text in an effort to make it easier to distinguish what type of text each thing is within the language. These things include items such as bookmarks, comments, keywords, strings, and much more.

Another excellent feature about Textpad is the spellchecker. For those of you are are notoriously bad spellers or just don't type carefully enough, this is the tool for you. Instead of having to copy the text into a similar program such as MS Word or Writer, you can check your spelling right inside of Textpad. Fortunately, Textpad is also smart enough to recognize the difference between a piece of code and a misspelled word. I was impressed because unlike some of the other spellcheckers I have tried, this one didn't flag me for things such as line breaks and divisions.

The one feature of Textpad that I find indespencible is the ability to view line numbers. I believe this is a must for any text editor. I was disappointed to find out that this wasn't turned on by default. Fortunately, this is easily solved and can be enabled under the view pane under preferences. Anybody who has used a text editor extensively will understand the usefulness of this seemingly simple item. Often when going through bug and validation reports, you will be given an error and a line number. With this feature, you can quickly find the line number and know the line numbers around it to make locating the bugs and invalid scripts you are trying to fix easier.

Another very useful feature is View in Web Browser. With a single click you can open up your current web page you are working on in your web browser, saving you the time of having to go through and open each page up manually through Windows Explorer.

Other Features

Textpad has a bunch of other features beyond what I have touched on so far. Among these is a feature called Compare Files. What this does is it breaks up 2 files of your choice, generally by breaks in the file, and compares them on top of each other in the same window. For example, it will take the title section from 2 files and compare them seperated by 3 dashes. This feature is hard to read and in my opinion terribly designed. There is no color coding or anything except the dashes to distinguish the files from each other and overall, I would consider this to look mostly like a mishmash of the two files.

There is also a sorting feature, which will allow you to sort your text up to 3 different ways in one sort. However, how this works is not very intuitive, making it difficult to use. When you can make it work, it works great, but its limited amount of ways to sort and unintuitive interface stops this from being a great tool.

If you are into creating files for DOS, you can do that here too. There is a feature called Convert To DOS that is very useful for those of you who still do things in the DOS world. The usefulness of this is limited by the lack of DOS in today's computer world, but the feature does its job well.

The replace feature is slightly more fancy than that of the one in Notepad, while it is still just a find and replace tool, it is much faster than notepad and it will automatically populate the find field with whatever you have highlighted within the document, saving you time. Also you can do a global replace across multiple documents. This feature is invaluable when you are updating things across a multitude of files. Within seconds you could update the header of a set of web pages, a task that could take hours depending on how many pages you have.

Final Thoughts

Textpad is a very valuable tool to have on your computer. This program is not totally free. It is actually a full-featured never ending evaluation. Thus, if you don't mind putting up with the slow to go away nag screen when you first open Textpad, it's a great program. This program is essential for Web Designers and provides a much nicer look and feel than Notepad. I would highly recommend this program to anyone and it is part of my Software Essentials Pack. Go out and give it a try today, you will never want to use Notepad again. i

Rating: 4.5/5


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