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Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 20, 2006 at 05:51 AM
We, I have downloaded the free version of EditPad, and like the fact I have the choice of tabs and/or multiple open windows—which makes it great for writing.
I am not yet clear on the difference between the free version and the pro version, but it looks like the free version is all that I would need.
Thanks.
Daly
Wes Perdue wrote:
>Daly de Gagne wrote:
>>Wes, thanks. Can it have two or more windows open at the same
>time, or are you always
>>having to tab back and forth?
>>
>>Daly
>>
>
>Daly,
>
>I
>regularly have two EditPad windows open, one on each of two monitors. You can choose to
>have tabs if you like, but they’re not essential.
>
>Regards,
>Wes
Posted by Wes Perdue
Dec 20, 2006 at 06:30 AM
Daly de Gagne wrote:
>We, I have downloaded the free version of EditPad, and like the fact I have the choice of
>tabs and/or multiple open windows—which makes it great for writing.
>
>I am not yet
>clear on the difference between the free version and the pro version, but it looks like
>the free version is all that I would need.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Daly
>
Excellent; I’m glad you like it. The pro features I use every day include regular expression search. I’m an IT manager, and I regularly need to do complex search and replace procedures to reformat data when moving it from one place to another.
I also use the spell check feature regularly, as I prefer to write into EditPad and then paste into other applications. Hexadecimal mode is also incredibly useful to me. Finally, I use it regularly to compare two different versions of files.
Enjoy!
Regards,
Wes
Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 20, 2006 at 07:12 AM
Hi Daly,
There are a lot of good single-pane plain text editors around - free and shareware. Most are - not surprisingly - oriented towards programing, or use with markup (like html, etc), but also make excellent writing environments. As Wes says, EditPad Pro is a good one, and there is also a free version (Lite) with tabbed editing and multiple windows.
Once one moves into two-pane editors (aka outliners, notetakers, etc.) things get more complicated. File structure is more complex because of their topic+note structure. Users also want to styling and formatting, which means a rich-text editor. And the ability to store images, which means that file-size has to be kept down, and so developers start using compression.
With some exceptions, once one moves away from single-pane plain text editors, it is harder to work in plain text. NoteTab outline files and and InSight catalog files are still more-or-less plain text and very readable. WhizFolders, Jot+ and KeyNote files (to take some common examples) are somewhat less so because of file compression, rich-text and sheer complexity. The main practical drawbacks here are that one loses the simplicity of plain-text editing, and also that search software find it more difficult to index and display search results in a readable form.
As Wes points out, the same applies to Zoot at the storage level. Although Zoot uses plain text for editing, its *.zot files are quite complex, although much of the data is still in readable plain text. Although the files can be indexed and searched, though, it is often easier to output to html and search that file instead.
As I use Zoot for a lot of my data-collection, organization and planning, and as it only uses a simple plain text editor, it has made me think seriously about postponing all styling until much further down the “composition” road, until it goes into MS-Word for final formatting. Hence my interest in plain-text editors, especially those with the ability to produce plain-text topic+note outline files (like NoteTab or InSight). A possible way of working might be Zoot, Brainstorm (also plain text), NoteTab Pro, and finally Word…
There are other options though. As Ian Goldsmid said in June the new WhizFolders beta seems to offer the possibility of allowing Zoot items to be hyperlinked to WhizFolder nodes and notes. Since WhizFolders has a reasonably “kindly” writing environment, offers both topic+notes and conventional file formats, tabbed and multi-window editing, etc., this is probably worth exploring, too.
Sorry this turned out to be rather a screed…
Derek
Posted by criss
Dec 20, 2006 at 08:44 AM
Hi Daly,
don’t forget to try the professional editors like EmEditor, Ultraedit (and Boxer):
You can have an outline within the text (you can define the indicators for the levels, f.e. indents, or A), B) ... ), you can create an “outline” of the texts with a foldertree (explorer-plugin) and you can quickly “format” your text via free definable syntax highlighting (f.e. I create headlines by letting the editor display in colour and bold the line after A), B) .....)
There is also autocomplete as you type (nice for often used technical expressions).
There are many more very useful text editing features (search and replace in disk files, macros, move lines up/down, indent ....).
For organisation I use a rather simple filetree together with tags. I prefix the tags with “::”, so they are easy to find and can be easily replaced = rename of a tag. Most are placed in the first line of a text file after “Tags>”. So f.e. to tag many files at once I can search for the files to tag and than replace in all found files “Tags>” with “Tags> ::newtag”).
best regards
Christian
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Dec 20, 2006 at 03:47 PM
Chriss, Derek, Wes and all, I have now downloaded EditPad, UltraEdit, and Emeditor—talk about a major CRIMP attack—must be the devilishly short hours of daylight on the Canadian Prairies at this time of year.
So, any thoughts on how they compare with each other, or what I should be looking for?
Are these particular programs all more or less the same, or are there important differences I should be aware of?
One must for me is being able to have multiple windows of the same or different docs open at the same time for moving stuff back and forth, and I know that EditPad does that, as well as offering tabs, which is also something I want.
Thanks for your help.
Daly