Recently I had some problems with the Adobe GoLive installed on my PC, I begann to use PSPad as my main source-code editor. The main reason for it is the generic search/change in all files of the project. I wanted to improve the legibility of my code by making certain, that all =,+,- chars are preceeded and followed by a space.
I created my project by taking over a folder. Thus all image-files were also included, as well as the .htaccess file. 1.) Changing 1 character in all the project files corrupted the image files (.jps, .gif, .ico,...). PSPad should recognise, that these are image-files and should not attempt to modify them. 2.) Changes wanted in - say - .js files might be unwanted in say .html files. Here there are 2 possibilities for improvement: a.) "Open all files with extension .xxx"; or even a mask as in the standard Windows searches. Thereafter one could do a generic search/change in all open files. b.) In the the panel one could specify one or more extension(s) and only those files would be considered. This could be even extended to be able to enter a search-mask. That would allow making modifications in a specific group of files without to have to open all of them. 3.) When creating a new project, it would be nice to be able to drag a folder or just files onto the "new project" panel. 4.) PSPad ignores the changes of the actual folder-structure. Thus it might try to load a non-existent file, which can lead to an abend. There should be a function: Actualise project-structure. This would check if the structure in in project still corresponds to the folder-structure. If a file is deleted, it should give a warnig allowing the user either to restore the file or delete it from the project. If there are files in the folders which are not in the projecr, PSPad should display a panel with the new files. For each of the files there should be a check-box to be ticked to add the file to the project. There should be an option to for a positive or negative extensions-list to specify that a.) only files with this extension or b.) all files but those with this extension can be added to the project. This would also solve the problem explained in 1.): no image, video or sound files files would accepted. I would even say, that there should be a standard positive list of all the extensions of source-text-files to which one could add his/her specific extensions. 5.) PSPad should recognise the standard file extensions and set the view-context accordingly. It is annoying to open a .js file and have .html highlighting for it. All the above require relatively simple changes, as they can use Windows APIs with the required parameters. 6.) It would be nice to be able to check say .js syntax with a simple button-click. PSPad could open the LINT homepage, automaticall copy the code into its box and initiate the check. 7.) After I managed to repair my GoLive installation, I stayed with PSPad as the main source-code editor, but still use GoLive to transfer the files to the server. I do this, because as far as I see, PSPad can just transfer files using FTP, but has no facilities to synchronise the PC and server, or rather, recognise which files have changed since they were transfered to the server. This could be done analog to the text-compare function: two listview-panels with checkboxes. The differences would be highlighted. The checked files would be up or downloaded. For each panel there could be a button: check all highlighteds. A further refinement would be a "Delete" button for the server-files. The checked files/folders would be deleted. With all these changes, PSPad would be the ideal tool for all those, who prefer to write their own code, to remain in full control of their internet-presence. -- <http://forum.pspad.com/read.php?4,52314,52314> PSPad freeware editor http://www.pspad.com
