Text editor for text

[Richard Steinfeld]

I need a text editor that's appropriate for text work (as opposed to
programming). Such an editor would have the following abilities:

Word wrap, including wrapping when new text is inserted into an existing
line.

Wrapping to a specific, settable, right margin.

Classic WordStar CRTL key commands for cursor jump by word left, word
right, delete left, delete right. (CTRL plus L arrow, R arrow, BS, DEL).
Good choice of keyboard commands so that the user doesn't always have to
lunge to the mouse for everything.

Ability to save the file with hard boundaries at the end of every line,
if desired.

Basic civilized print settings, including:

Print with same right margin that's displayed on the screen and/or saved
in file.
Set page borders.
Toggle headers and footers on/off.
User-entered standard header and footer text codes (time, date, file
name, page number, "page n of y").
User entered header and footer text.
Choice of three horizontal locations where header/footer text will be
printed.

Save in ASCII. Display with fixed-width fonts, such as Courier.

I think that's it. A spell checker would be good, too.

I'm weary of testing notepad replacment programs. I've tried Metapad,
Prolix, BDV, NoteTab, Subpad, Notepad 2, Elfima, PSPad, Textpad, TED,
and Notepad ++.

Almost every one of these is good-to-great, if you happen to be a
programmer: a programmer who works almost exclusively on the screen.
They all failed when it came to the basic must-have essentials that I
laid out above.

What I'm looking for is a sensible replacement for MS Notepad,
especially one where you don't get a lot of mis-aligned garbage out of
the printer. Fancy formatting isn't required. In other words, it's fine
if it doesn't work with fonts, bold/underline/italic, etc. The idea is
to be able to take quick and dirty notes, but also to paste them into
fixed width text boxes, emails, and serious word programs. And to print
out note files now and then and stick them into a looseleaf binder.

Any ideas?

Richard

 

[aafuss]

E-Type:
http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?21000000038621

 

[B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson]

I need a text editor that's appropriate for text work (as opposed to
programming). Such an editor would have the following abilities:

[Snip]

I think, you should try Crimson Editor:

www.crimsoneditor.com

Regarding your wish list I see only one flaw at the moment: It doesn't
support DOS Ascii. You *can* show a file using an OEM font for correct
Ascii display. But if you type letters of the extended part of the
charset they will be inserted as if it was an Ansi (Windows encoding)
file... If you need correct DOS Ascii support you maybe should contact
Ingyu Kang.

BeAr

 

[Francesco Ghirlanda]

Il Sat, 6 Aug 2005 09:34:47 +0200, B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson ha scritto:

I need a text editor that's appropriate for text work (as opposed to
programming). Such an editor would have the following abilities:

[Snip]

I think, you should try Crimson Editor:

www.crimsoneditor.com

I absolutely agree, Crimson Editor is really great.

 

[B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson]

I absolutely agree, Crimson Editor is really great.

Don't use it myself. Its strengths lie in other fields than my needs.
But it *is* a great piece of software and always worth a look.

BeAr

 

[Francesco Ghirlanda]

Il Sat, 6 Aug 2005 10:20:30 +0200, B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson ha scritto:

Don't use it myself. Its strengths lie in other fields than my needs.
But it *is* a great piece of software and always worth a look.

Well, I use it and it's one of the few software I can't live without...even
if I use only a few features of the many it has!

 

[Richard Steinfeld]

I need a text editor that's appropriate for text work (as opposed to
programming). Such an editor would have the following abilities:

[Snip]

I think, you should try Crimson Editor:

www.crimsoneditor.com

Regarding your wish list I see only one flaw at the moment: It doesn't
support DOS Ascii. You *can* show a file using an OEM font for correct
Ascii display. But if you type letters of the extended part of the
charset they will be inserted as if it was an Ansi (Windows encoding)
file... If you need correct DOS Ascii support you maybe should contact
Ingyu Kang.

BeAr

Thanks for the endorsement, everyone.

Bear, let's see if I understand what you're saying:

When you say "DOS ASCII," I assume that you're talking about the old
"IBM Extended ASCII character set." In other words, the character set
used on the pre-graphics IBM PC, in which the higher characters
consisted of symbols used in mathematics and physics, non-English
characters; and symbols that, when used together, formed different kinds
of boxes that looked so cool when our batchfiles put them onto the screen.

And that when you say "ANSI (Windows)," it still includes the
traditional lowest-numbered ASCII teletype symbols, such as BEL, ACK, etc.

Is that it?

If so, it's not much of a loss. On a teletype, when I did radio, BEL
made the teletype machine go "ding ding ding ding ding," to alert anyone
in earshot that a fast-breaking story or a major news item was going to
print. I don't think we do that any more. We also don't do IBM PC on an
8088. Makes you feel old, doesn't it?

Richard

 

[Richard Steinfeld]

Il Sat, 6 Aug 2005 10:20:30 +0200, B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson ha scritto:




Well, I use it and it's one of the few software I can't live without...even
if I use only a few features of the many it has!

Is the download a stand-alone program or an install routine? I can't
tell from examining the messages embedded in the code.

Richard

 

[Bernd Schmitt]

Hello Richard,

Richard Steinfeld was looking for an editor:

Word wrap, including wrapping when new text is inserted into an existing
line. yes

Wrapping to a specific, settable, right margin. yes

Classic WordStar CRTL key commands for cursor jump by word left, word
right, delete left, delete right. (CTRL plus L arrow, R arrow, BS, DEL).

yes (has a word-star-mode)

Good choice of keyboard commands so that the user doesn't always have to
lunge to the mouse for everything.

you do not need mouse at all (but you can of course use menues, buttons ...)

Ability to save the file with hard boundaries at the end of every line,
if desired.

not sure about that

Basic civilized print settings, including:
Print with same right margin that's displayed on the screen and/or saved
in file.
Set page borders.
Toggle headers and footers on/off.
User-entered standard header and footer text codes (time, date, file
name, page number, "page n of y").
User entered header and footer text. yes

Choice of three horizontal locations where header/footer text will be
printed.

not sure

Save in ASCII. Display with fixed-width fonts, such as Courier. yes

A spell checker yes

What I'm looking for is a sensible replacement for MS Notepad,
especially one where you don't get a lot of mis-aligned garbage out of
the printer. Fancy formatting isn't required. In other words, it's fine
if it doesn't work with fonts, bold/underline/italic, etc. The idea is
to be able to take quick and dirty notes, but also to paste them into
fixed width text boxes, emails, and serious word programs. And to print
out note files now and then and stick them into a looseleaf binder.

Any ideas?

If you want a really powerful editor, here is my choice:

G N U - E M A C S
(or if you need even more buttons/menues: xemacs)


the program:
no registry entry,
no install,
download size 18MB,
executable size 4.5MB,
tutorial in many languages,
extensive documentation/customizing,
maximum scriptable using ELISP,
free software (GPL) will _never_ become proprietary,
available on nearly all platforms (windows, linux, unix, ....)


text:
auto-save, unlimited undo, international code/unicode/dos/windows/unix,
multiple file open/view,
split view (multiple horizontal/vertical),
spell checker,
search/replace(/insert) with regular expressions/incremental,
sorting,
bookmarks,
vertical editing, ascii-art-mode, text-folding/hiding,
postscript-printing,
encryption, zip


programming:
syntax highlightning,
auto-indent (different/customizable styles)
auto-completion,
class-browser, bookmarks, etags,
front end for controll-version-systems (cvs, svn, gnu-arch ...),
diff, merge,
front end for (cli) debugger/compiler,
very special commands never seen elsewhere (*-eval-defun),
can use unix manpages on every platform (woman/info) including those
for perl/tcl/c/c++/...


other features:
calendar, diary, time-log,
calculator,
directory-browser (open, rename, delete ...)
hex-editor,
rot13, morsing,
games (snake, tetris, 4wins, ...),
psychatrist (ELIZA - artificial intelligence,


maybe i have forgotten some features ...


Ciao
Bernd

 

[B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson]

Thanks for the endorsement, everyone.

You're welcome.

Bear, let's see if I understand what you're saying:

When you say "DOS ASCII," I assume that you're talking about the old
"IBM Extended ASCII character set."

Yes. In all its variants.

And that when you say "ANSI (Windows)," it still includes the
traditional lowest-numbered ASCII teletype symbols, such as BEL, ACK, etc.

That's not the point. I refer to Ansi (Windows) when talking about the
charset used inside Windows to represent the (indexed) position of chars
inside an overall charset. Hm, I'm not too correct here. It is an
exhaustive topic, though.

Let's assume you wrote a text in good old days of DOS. You would have
done so in one flavor of the so called ASCII charset. The first 32 char
positions contained the control characters you referred to. The next
96 characters were printable characters with fixed positions through
all kinds of ASCII charset. Together with the control codes they built
up the 7 Bit teletype charset.

Later on, computers got less limited in resources and the requirements
for additional chars rose. - You mentioned box-drawing chars. But there
is also need for umlauts and other chars found in non-English languages.

To support *all* these, another 128 chars aren't enough. So IBM introduced
several ASCII charsets with different upper byte chars. The classic English
charset got named code page 437. On position 228 you'll see the Σ (Sum)
symbol, for instance. Here in Germany we often used code page 850, instead.
If I read your text, I would see an õ (an o with a tilde on top) instead
of your Sum symbol.

The same occurs when switching from DOS to Windows *without* changing
country settings. Although Ascii became an Ansi standard at some time,
referring to Ansi character encoding mostly means Windows charsets.
You can call it laziness when dealing with confusingly complex topics...

Let's switch back to your hypothetic text written in an English DOS.
If you open it inside Windows its content will be interpreted according
to the Western character set Ansi 1252 (supporting English, French, German,
Italian, Spanish). Now you see a nice ä (German umlaut for ae - an a with
2 dots above) as replacement for your Sum char.

And now to the Crimson Editor. You can select a font which *displays*
the Sum char correctly. And (as there is no Sum key on the keyboard)
you would likewise see a µ (Greek character Micro sign) correctly for
char 230. But if you would *input* another Micro sign using the key
combination AltGr+m you would see a box drawing char inside your text,
instead. That's because Crimson editor doesn't translate keyboard input
according to the charset of the selected font, but *always* uses the
standard interpretation of Windows (Ansi 1252 for an English system).

But I think, if you truly would need correct support for DOS charsets
you wouldn't have asked what I could have meant. Because you would
have had to worry about these problems for ages. (As I did - and am
still doing...) ;-)

To your question inside another post:
| Is the download a stand-alone program or an install routine? I can't
| tell from examining the messages embedded in the code.

It is an NSIS archive with about 600 files inside. Most are language
specific files for programming languages. The files can simply be
copied out of the archive. If you run the Editor after that for the
first time you get an error message regarding wrong or missing path
entries. And that's it. On the next start everything is fine.

BeAr

 

[Richard Steinfeld]

B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson wrote:

(Crimson Editor)

To your question inside another post:
| Is the download a stand-alone program or an install routine? I can't
| tell from examining the messages embedded in the code.

It is an NSIS archive with about 600 files inside. Most are language
specific files for programming languages. The files can simply be
copied out of the archive. If you run the Editor after that for the
first time you get an error message regarding wrong or missing path
entries. And that's it. On the next start everything is fine.

I'm still confused, BeAr.

What I need to know is whether the downloaded executable will install
the program or not -- in other words, will the Crimson .exe download
just run the program, or will run an installation routine. The reason I
want to know this in advance is that I use an installation
tracker/uninstaller, and if I click on the .exe and it starts
installing, it's too late for me to take this reasonable precaution.

From what you wrote, it seems that the .exe download just unpacks an
archive of files. (Thanks for the tip, by the way.)

I didn't find any reference to installation or stand-along operation
after looking on the site for 15 minutes. Maybe I didn't get to the
right part of the site. So, if you can answer this, I'll be grateful.

Thanks.

Richard

 

[Jane D]

On Sat 06 Aug 2005 08:34:47, B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson wrote:

I need a text editor that's appropriate for text work (as
opposed to programming). Such an editor would have the
following abilities:

[Snip]

I think, you should try Crimson Editor:

www.crimsoneditor.com

Can Crimson Editor be made to insert characters at the beginning of
each line such as the character > in order to create text which can
be posted to newsgroups or used in emails?

 

[B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson]

What I need to know is whether the downloaded executable will install
the program or not -- in other words, will the Crimson .exe download
just run the program, or will run an installation routine. The reason I
want to know this in advance is that I use an installation
tracker/uninstaller, and if I click on the .exe and it starts
installing, it's too late for me to take this reasonable precaution.

If you got the cedt370r.exe file - you have a self extracting archive
which runs a simple installation wizard. It asks you to agree to the
license and lets you select some components (editor, syntax/templates)
and whether it should install a start menu entry and so on. It lets
you select a target directory, too.

And yes, the setup cedt370r.exe file contains all needed files. No
additional download from internet. As I said: I just extracted all
files from the archive using the free InstallExplorer plugin for the
non-free <OT>Total Commander</OT>.

Crimson Editor reads and writes (quiet a lot) from and to the registry,
but does so on every execution. So it is not too good an editor for USB
thumb drive usage, for instance.

BeAr

 

[jmatt]

Richard Steinfeld

The reason I
want to know this in advance is that I use an installation
tracker/uninstaller, and if I click on the .exe and it starts
installing, it's too late for me to take this reasonable precaution.

Here is some extra info, re uninstalling.

===================================

If Install is used in Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel when
adding new programs, it will add it to the Add/Remove list.

=====================================

Manually Uninstalling a Program
http://surecool.net/manuninst.htm

====================================

Even when using Add/Remove or unistallers, you will quite often get
the pop up window, saying
it is a shared file.
I do not remove.
After the uninstall I look in Windows Explorer or Start > Find

Files & Folders for folders

that refer to the removed program. Often the name is different to the
Program, so make sure
you write down all the details referring to the program, such the
manufacturer's name etc.
I then delete & run jv16 PowerTools.
jv16 PowerTools 1.3.0.195, which doesn't expire, is available here:
jv16 PowerTools 1.3.0.195, which doesn't expire, is available here:
http://spazioinwind.libero.it/puntocr/dwl/jv16pt_setup.exe
http://down.hengshui.com/download.asp?downid=1&id=726
http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page7.html
http://www.pricelessware.org/thelist/sys.htm
Click on Registry Tool > Tools > Registry Cleaner > Continue

Start.

When finished, Click on Select > Special select > Items that
should be safe to remove > Remove.

* Posted via http://www.sixfiles.com/forum
* Please report abuse to http://xinbox.com/sixfiles

 

[Richard Steinfeld]

If you got the cedt370r.exe file - you have a self extracting archive
which runs a simple installation wizard. .....

Crimson Editor reads and writes (quiet a lot) from and to the registry,
but does so on every execution. So it is not too good an editor for USB
thumb drive usage, for instance.

BeAr

Thanks,BeAr: that's what I needed to know.
I'm looking forward to trying this out.

Richard

 

[B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson]

Can Crimson Editor be made to insert characters at the beginning of
each line such as the character > in order to create text which can
be posted to newsgroups or used in emails?

At least 2 methods possible. You can define a syntax type mail and get
it an appropriate $LINECOMMENT= char or string inside its *.spc file.
This way you could also add a suitable syntax coloring to your mails.
The second (and in most cases more convenient) way is via the replace
function:

Select the lines and fire up the <Replace> dialog. Be sure to select
<Replace in ... Selection> and <Regular expression>. The Find string
is a simple [^] (without the square brackets, of course!!) the string
for Replace is [>] or [> ] depending on the depth level of the
reference.

BeAr

 

[David]

B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson wrote:

(Crimson Editor)

I'm still confused, BeAr.

What I need to know is whether the downloaded executable will install
the program or not -- in other words, will the Crimson .exe download
just run the program, or will run an installation routine. The reason I
want to know this in advance is that I use an installation
tracker/uninstaller, and if I click on the .exe and it starts
installing, it's too late for me to take this reasonable precaution.

From what you wrote, it seems that the .exe download just unpacks an
archive of files. (Thanks for the tip, by the way.)

I didn't find any reference to installation or stand-along operation
after looking on the site for 15 minutes. Maybe I didn't get to the
right part of the site. So, if you can answer this, I'll be grateful.

Thanks.

Richard

There were quite a number of registry entries when I installed
including an addition to the context menu which I find very handy. I
would track it if I were you. I haven't checked the uninstall to see
if it leaves anything behind,

 

[thoss]

I need a text editor that's appropriate for text work (as opposed to
programming).

Have a look at VDE:

http://uk.geocities.com/short_stop_uk/index.htm

 

[Hengist_Ludd]

WSedit, Dr. Martin Vieregg's freeware WordStar-like editor for Windows

http://www.writeandset.com/english/indxf.html

does some of what you want. I haven't found a text editor for Windows
that I really like...