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Latest news

15 Jan 2008: New version 4.75 of Notepad++ released which fixes some bugs.

05 Feb 2007: PSPad Beta version 4.5.3 (build 2255) has been released featuring fixes and changes for Vista

Links:

• PSPad
• Notepad++
• InfoRapid Search and Replace

Source Editors

When you have exhausted the possibilities of Notepad it is time to consider some of the other offerings which can dramatically decrease the amount of editing time required. For example you may want to convert some text to xml and none of the supposed automatic conversions work. In fact whenever you are performing any repetitive action on a text file you will find the products below will help.

Both of the editors mentioned below are capable of performing an excellent job. I just have the feeling that PSPad being the more mature product has a slight edge. This may be a biased view because I have used this as my editor of choice for some time, mainly to manipulate large blocks of text into XML. However, recently I have found that Notepad++ seems to do a better job at dealing with colour highlighting for certain formats, such as HTML and XAML, so the short answer is that both of these editors are required depending on the circumstances.

Pspad Editor

One of the best freeware editors I have found is Pspad. If you have any heavy editing task to do, such as repetitive edits on large files, then this is the tool to use. There is also a vary active forum on the Pspad website which keeps you informed of new features and bugs. If you register on the forum then you can also obtain access to extensions that have been added to the main product.

Regular Expressions

From force of habit I normally use Pspad when it comes to working with regular expressions. For example if you want to change the format of a date in a file from 'dd/mm/yyyy' to 'yyyy-mm-dd ss:ss:ss' then it is fairly straightforward using the following regular expression :-
Search for ([0-9]{1,2}).([0-9]{1,2}).([0-9]{4})
Replace with $3-$2-$1 00:00:00

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a source editor and Notepad replacement written in C++ with the win32 API. The aim of Notepad++ is to offer a slim and efficient application with a totally customizable GUI. I am using version 4.2 which comes complete with several plugins, see list below :-

Compare

Use this plugin to compare the contents of two files side by side. Differences are highlighted and colour coded which makes it a very useful tool. This is an optional plugin and needs to be downloaded separately from the Sourceforge site.

Function List

This is a tool that allows you to list all the functions called in a particular program, but only works for certain languages such as C++, Pascal and PHP. You can then click on a function in the list to take you directly to the code.

TextFX

This plugin has an over complicated menu setup but does provide a number of very useful text editing commands such as deleting blank lines, text conversions etc.

Explorer Plugin

Calls up Windows explorer box from within C++, allowing you to browse any file. I am not really sure what advantage this has over the file open command in Notepad++.

InfoRapid Search & Replace

If you need to search and replace across multiple files for text then the InfoRapid solution works well and is free for non commercial use. I use this a lot mainly to check for consistency across my website. I still tend to use Notepad++ for making the individual changes because there are all sorts of unexpected results that can happen when making a multiple edit. However, as I gain more experience with this product I am sure I will try it out in order to save a bit of time.