Greetings, one and all! I'm a webmaster and an x/html/php/mysql developer. I've been using UltraEdit for a while now, so I'm accustomed to a very robust and powerful text editor/IDE.
I've been using PSPad for a couple of days now, and I'm finding some very compelling reasons to switch to it (from UltraEdit)... * The code explorer is AWESOME! :-) * Better macro functionality (but still a long way from the very robust "clip" programming language of Notetab Pro (viz http://www.notetab.com/ntp.php )) * Extendability via plugins and WSH scripting support. * I LOVE the auto-correct (I've been an MS Word power user for years and am very accustomed to having a large set of personal "abbreviations" that get auto-corrected into my text.) * All the wonderful integrated tools- Tidy, Top Style, Lorem Ipsum generator - great stuff! All in all, I'm SUPER impressed with PSPad and will be sticking with it as my main (and hopefully ONLY) text/programming editor. That said, here are some problems I'm having. Maybe they're bugs, or maybe I'm just doing something wrong... 1. I can't figure out how to save changes I make to the Tool Panel. I add some tabs and close some others (by first dragging them to become floating panels, then closing), but every time I restart PSPad, the new tabs I added are gone and have to be re-added, and the ones I closed are back, as floating panels, and have to be closed every time. 2. When I add entries to the auto-correct panel, the "Reload Dictionary" button stays grayed out and I have to close and reopen PSPad in order to use the new auto-correct entry. 3. In the File Explorer tab of the Tool Panel, I can only select one file? Ctrl+click and shift+select would be really, REALLY useful here. Same thing for the ftp panel. 4. I want to make the syntax highlighting a little more granular for php. (It's sometimes difficult to tell a parenthesis from a curly bracket; I once wasted a day and a half trying to debug a problem in a php page in UltraEdit until I realized that what I thought was a close curly brace was really a close parenthesis. After that, I changed the color of braces.) I'd like to be able to do that in PSPad. I assume the way to do it is via the user highlighter, but the very first step is selecting the appropriate INI file - and there isn't one for PHP!? I'll close this very long post with one final observation: PSPad *NEEDS* code folding. I've seen some of the other threads on this forum about this, and I just want to say that code folding is _absolutely essential_ for any decent code editor. The advanced bookmarking is great, and the Code Explorer is wonderful, but neither is an actual replacement replacement for code folding. IMHO, this is the *only* bit of core functionality that PSPad lacks. When PSPad has code folding, it will be the absolute best code editor available. -- <http://forum.pspad.com/read.php?2,40270,40270> PSPad freeware editor http://www.pspad.com
