Sunday, March 19, 2006

Site: Death of a Text Editor

Ah, the good old days of memory limits. Good times, good times. Okay, not so much. Today marked something of a dubious landmark for the Color Computer Collector's Price Guide. I ran out of space in MS WordPad. I've known this was coming for awhile, of course. Originally, I just kept the a price list for my own reference and intended to delete items I was tracking as I aquired them. So, in my shortsighted nature, when I started keeping the list more thoroughly and posting it, I should have just switched editors.

Notepad uses some sort of funky 8 space tab (most editors default to 4 or 6 apparently). So my search for a new editor required the ability to easily reset the tabs. But I also wanted it to be small and quick, but with pretty much unlimited file size. Oh, and it has to run on the ancient and decrepit Windows ME, since that's what the family PC has on it (the wife won't let me mess with it until I get another PC operational... heh.... which is probably pretty smart given my track record with modifying PCs. Oh, they do get fixed eventually. Eventually.)

I settled on Notepad++, a free GNU license editor.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

It has line numbering, working line highlighting and easy resetting of the tab spots. It makes perfect plain ASCII text files and hosts a bevy of other formats. Makes a handy HTML editor. It also has many features I won't ever use, but it's small and fast, so they dont' get in the way either. The tabbed document feature may come in handy soon if I decide to break the price guide into sections. It even has a nice little macro mode that might be handy at some point. The bookmark feature makes it much easier to jump between sections while adding items.

If you need a good text editor, give Notepad++ a shot. It's a very mature platform and the price is right.

And a Price Guide update is coming shortly. ;)

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