Gena01.com Forum

I have started doing some spring cleaning of Win32Pad source code. I am currently reworking the code and restructuring it.
I am also thinking of adding a ton of new features and fixing some old bugs. Some of the existing features will be analyzed
and rewritten. I am also thinking of redoing the menus structure and adding much awaited Options and About dialogs.
Please use this thread in order to suggest new features or submit bug reports.

Gena01

A spell checker would be really nice.  Thanks for such a great product!  :)

thank you for this great product!

"Find" & "Replace" cannot work correctly in Chinese OS.

there are an awful lot of feature-rich text editors out there, so if you add a lot of stuff, will you continue to make the latest 1.x release available?

a basic feature that would be nice: Ctrl+arrow_keys scrolls horizontally or vertically.

keep it clean, and keep going. :)

It could be interesting that Win32Pad to be multilingual using a simple text file like WGens (http://gens.consolemul.com/) or MPEG Audio Collection (http://www.jfaul.de/)...

Thank you for your great program !

So when can we expect 2.x?
 :)

oooooooh... and command line switches for things like line numbering, word wrap, etc. are really nice when you have win32pad associated with many different type of files...  :)

I've a great advice.Please add dos charset to your cute text editor and it would be the best editor.Because I can't read dot txt files:(.
Thanx for attention

Eugene,

You can use "Terminal" Font already with Win32Pad and it should have support for DOS characters.

Gena01

bug\question
Does not highlight URLs, email@address...
"Can't change URL detection" - what does that mean?

suggestions to new version:
1) options to set\remove\autohide: menu bar, tile bar (fullscrean mode)
2) menu. shorten menu string:
- move menu item VIEW to OPTIONS
- move menu item INSERT to EDIT
- move menu item WORDWRAP to OPTIONS
- menu->help->about: clickable urls
3) by default options:
- wordwrap=on
- highlight urls=on
- set default filename("untitled01.txt" for example)
4) drug&drop files to win32pad should add text to existing file, not open new file (opening could be done by doubleclick or rightmouseclick->"open with..." features)
5) context menu:
- remove wordwrap
- add "email" item: crops the selected text, launch default smtp client, paste text into it.
6) autocomplete words from a text file (when typing a word win32pad offer complete word from file autocomplete.txt). Like autotext option does in M$Word. Do not create this file automatically. Use if it exists.

Thanks for nice program.

Hi Genadi,

Looking forward to this new version.
I'd like to remind you on my requests for searching backwards, HotKey(s) for the Search & Replace options (I suggest F3/<shift>F3), reassigning the Revert HotKey to F5. I hope they will be among the new features.

Furthermore I was thinking that it would be nice to have an AutoIndent to be able to do some serious scripting. Think of this in combination with user-defined tab spacing... Awesome!

But! I agree with keso, who added a comment on the Win32Pad v2.x Screenshot page:
Most important is... win32pad 1.x is nice and small!
Keep it lean and mean.

Good Luck!

Actually "User-defined tab size" and "Auto-indent" are currently implemented in v2.x series.

It's currently being tested by a couple of people (via private ALPHA builds).

Gena01

Option to keeping the Undo/Redo after saving.
Option - Warning dialog with OK/Cancel when trying to open a large file(1MB+ or user defined)
Option to turn on/off recent files

Thank You.

>>Option to keeping the Undo/Redo after saving.

This is already done.

>>Option - Warning dialog with OK/Cancel when trying to open a large file(1MB+ or user defined)
>>Option to turn on/off recent files

Hmm... sounds interesting. I might actually add it to my list of TODO items.

Gena01

Option not to display "There is unsaved data. Save it?" dialog when exiting, I use Notepad/Win32Pad for storing temporary clipboard entries and when I dont need the window anymore asking this dialog wastes some time.

Or perhaps option not to save when window is [Untitled] - not saved into file.

Byte count and regular expressions would be nice to have too, but whatever you do don't do it at expense of startup speed.

Perhaps hotkey to reopen current file in predefined editor, would be handy sometimes.

Thanks :)

When considering adding new features please keep in mind that people find Win32Pad so great because its so lightweight.

If any (major) features are added then it would be really good to be able to wait for them only if you need them. For example any feature affecting load time should be able to be disabled so that it does not affect it.

What comes to the features.. Well, here's my wishlist:
- Unicode support with optional byte-order-marks (UTF-8 would be enough for me)
- syntax coloring per file type (especially I'd like to have all words starting with \ colored as I'm a TeX user)


Regards,
Jani Kajala

A very nice Notepad replacement.

My wishlist:

- Exit the Win32Pad with the Esc
- More shortcuts for the keyboard (for example Save as)
- Byte count, Word count

Keep it leightweight

Just downloaded win32pad - very nice, just what I'm looking for - small, efficient & addresses the irritating quirks of Notepad.
Anyway, my wish is below

Opening a text file which has '.LOG' as the first line inserts the date - a useful (to me anyway) feature of Notepad, which win32pad doesn't yet have.

I'm running Win32Pad under Windows 2000 Traditional Chinese version. Sometimes I need to edit Simplied Chinese file, so support for Unicode is a must for me.

Also, please DO keep win32pad tiny.

tks

I think it will be better if "Search again" will start from current cursor position.

Win32Pad is great, I like it because it is so small!
So if there are new features coming, please think about the main
for this cute soft.. :-)

What would be really great:

A button where u can switch "highlight URL" ON/OFF because somtimes u want to select only a part of the URL but it selects
the whole URL.
By the way, when u switch "highlight URL" it takes only effect when win32pad is restarted.
Or if not a button, the possibility to rightklick on the URL and a pop up menue where u can "open in standard browser" or
"copy to clipboard" would be very nice

Max

Excuse my poor English.
All the posters commented about the very good program that you did. I add to the same view.
One features that you can evaluate for add or not in future versions:
In search and replace, the posibility of search special characters. (tab, intro, Etc.) as in Word "Special characters"
Thank you very much for this free , small and very useful program.
I can translate this to Spanish if you want. Don't judge my English writing, I know exactly how translate all the menu and the help file for you as my modest contribution to this yours great work. I do not need any credit, I am only an end user.
[email protected]

Thanks for this nice editor. I like the small size and quick load times, too, so keep those as top priorities. Still...

I would like a button on the Toolbar to toggle word wrap.

I would also like to be able to put the text file into read-only status with a button on the Toolbar and would like this to change either the foreground or background color.

I would like to be able to set the close "x" button of the window act as a minimize button (either to the task bar or the tray at my option). I still hit that button by mistake a lot (thanks, Microsoft).

Some sort of "line join" or "text unwrap" would be helpful. In my e-mail program, Eudora, there is a plug-in that unwraps text. This helps me put text copied from a webpage into good shape.

Thanks again for a handy program. Any of these features would be nice but keep the programsmall and fast.

Hi,

Interested in getting a text editor to read and save unix files, I ran a google search. After clicking and quickling backing out of several other sites I discovered this one. I downloaded Win32Pad and found it to be small, fast and incredibly easy to use. It was just what I was looking for.

I have since been using it to edit php code and html. And for the last three months it has become my editor of choice when hand editing these type of files, such as the coding I do at Solar Empire

I'd just like to thank you for this wonderful program and hope you the best in its future.

Maugrim

Not a huge bug, but it's still noticeable: When unselecting Highlight URLs from the menu, if you have a URL in the current document, it remains highlighted until you close and re-open the document.  The reverse is also true (ie. have a URL in the current document, turn on Highlight URLs, and the URL remains unhighlighted until you close and-reopen the document).

hi,

thanks for the great, lightweight program,and thanks for NOT using MFC.

The feature I would like most in version 2.xx would be using Tabs for multiple documents. This wouldn't be really hard to program and wouldn't bloat the program either.

BTW: Do you know Dev-C++ (www.bloodshed.net?

I use it as my development platform, it also uses the windows gcc port, is REALLY lightweight for an IDE, but with great features.


have a nice day,

MaxAuthority

Is there a way to restore the default Notepad Icon?  I seem to like it better.  BTW, great program.
Keep it small and keep it simple.

Great work, it certainly beats notepad by many lengths.

Working as a programmer in C++ and HTML, and work with a lot of files. Therefore my wishes :

1. Able to see line numbers in a column to the left.

2. Able to have several files open in the same instance of Win32Pad (Like in MultiEdit/UltraEdit or like Opera way of showing web-pages using tabs/fans)

3. Able to redefine hotkeys (This will stop any arguements about people wanting one or another key for a certain function)

4. Search and Replace on directory basis (Making it possible to search for files using wildcards to find a certain text-string) Though it requires a way listing of the found files and the lines which contains the certain text-string.

5. Syntax coloring, making it possible to define own syntax coloring and attach it to file-extension (I can see you can identify tokens like http, mailto etc.). Making a generic tokening which one can supply ones own text-file containing tokens to highlight blue. (A later extension would be to supply different types of tokens which gets different colors)

Although I like Ultraedit, I feel it's too bloated,  and started hunting for a light weight editor, yet satisfy my basic editing needs.

When saw the setup file size, was not really convinced the editor could be so small. Was under the impression that it was some fancy setup file where you pull the rest of the package via the Internet (aka Net installation like IE / Netscape )

But when installed, really surprised me as it contained most of the features I need, yet so small. Keep up the good work!

Just a few request that I hope you would consider in the next version.

1. Line numbers at the left side, toggle-able with a button on top.

2. Bottom taskbar shows if CAPlock and Numlock is on / off

3. Rename "Format" as "File format", it should be clearer.

like everyone else, i think this is a nice small editor.  great job.  

one idea though is that if you do want to get into a feature rich version or even just one with a few more features, maybe make a basic version, like the 1.x and make plug-ins available.  so if i want highlighting for your programmingyou can get that, but at the same time not have to download all the extra buttons and stuff everyone wants.  i mean i realize this would be a bigger pain in the butt than just making a big version with everything, but if you came up with some sort of basic language ( i only do php and web programming stuff, i dont know if this is like an insane task) but if you made some sort of basic language to add on features, i'm sure everyone on this board would make their own add on, and then you can add on whatever features you want, and have either a huge bloated feature rich editor, one with only what you need, or even just the barebones one, you got your choice.  

again, sorry if i sound ignorant, i haven't gotten into c because i haven't really had the interest in it yet, so i dont know if this is asking for too much meaning it wouldn't be free or whatever, but it would be a nice idea instead of bloating the program with stuff only a few people really want/need.

I would like you to keep it as small as it is, or i could just as well use word for editing. The only thing I would like to change is the ability to display line numbers starting from 0. Most script debuggers see the first line as 0.

practical case - I develop a web page with client side scripting. It pops an error and says the error is in line 55. I right-click and view source in win32pad. However, going to line 55 is incorrect. If line counting started at 0 it would be correct.

So basicaly a base option for line nubers would be invaluable, so you can get the most of win32pad, depending on what you use it for.

Thanks for saving me a lot of work. Normaly I had to copy the text from notepad and insert it into another editor to be able to go to a linenumber to do debugging.

Thanks for develop this program, currently it replaced
all the notepad program in windows I used, no matter
in company or home use, I like it very much and I've
been tried to translate the menu and message into
traditional chinese on ver 1.0.144, 1.12 & 1.14,
my wish to add a new feature for Hex editing,
it'll increase the editing ability for other file type
except pure text file, and no more needed to
use Ultraedit for the only choice.

Sincerely,
romdemon.

I want to use Win32pad as my default text editor.

Should I try renaming Win32pad.exe to Notepad.exe and overwriting Notepad in c:\Windows?

And thanks for the great software!

PS. My wish: syntax highgliting for 2.0.

It would be nice if we could change the color used for URL highlighting. Otherwise, it limits the background colors which can be used.

my favorite feature for the next version:

   a horizontal split-bar

to view two sections of the same file.
Very helpful when coding...

Otherwise: Great program!

Thank you for this great product!

My wishlist:

- Char / Word  in Statusbar
like:
Col:5 L:6/8 Char:231 Word:50

Nice program. Missing three things:

1. Regular expression support on find/replace
2. Select a block of text and be able to sort it both ascending and descending
3. Add/remove/change toolbar buttons

Keep the good work,

Roberto

I like this program, small and nice. When is version 2.0 going to come? I realy like to see it!  

Regards,
Henrik

I just wanna say, that you make a great product!
Keep it up!


P.S.
I see that everyone is making request for new options,
well I have one: an Always on top! function.

The only reason I sometimes use another editor is when I wanna have something on top to easely copy past between a .txt file and an application like MS Excel.

Always On Top  has been in Win32Pad for some time. Look in the "System" menu or right click Win32Pad button on the taskbar you should see an option for "Always on Top"

Gena01

In grungy old NotePad, if the first text in the file is '.LOG', the current date-time will be appended to the end of the existing file each time it is opened, and the cursor placed after that date-time string ready for appending more text to the file.

Unfortunately, (at least in W2K) once the file grows gets too big, an error occurs, and the date-time is not written out, though one still can append text  8-(

I use this to enable clients to keep a simple journal accessed from a desktop shortcut, training them to document their e-experiences rather than just verbally whining.  They quickly pick up on copying/cutting from their journal and pasting into an email message when needed.

They really like this seemingly simple but friendly capability.  Is this functionality planned for inclusion in WinPad?

It really is more popular than its simplicity would suggest ...

WinPad is a great program, even without .LOG functionality!

Gennady, thanks for a great program. V1.2.1 seems to do nearly everything I wanted V1.1.4 to do.

Except...

1. When saving a new file the default directory is always the directory where win32Pad is installed. The ability to change this default, or alternatively to remember where the last file was saved to would be good.

2. Double-clicking links seems to go slightly against the single-click orthodoxy.

3. It would be handy if the links to this forum and your web-page in the about box were actual links.

4. It would be lovely to be able to change the colours of links, and maybe even the colour of the highlighted area.

Having said that I'd better add my name to the list of those clamouring to keep it small. I'm sure you will. Of my four things only the first is anything more than aesthetic nit-picking.

Thanks again.

One other thing that would be truly wonderful: a word count function...

Thank's for a great (I mean small) program. I like the wordwrap function and looks forward for the possibility of numberd lines. Please don't let the program grow to be a big and feature rich one. It's strength is the size.

Hello!

All I want to say is that you did a great job with this tiny program. I really love it. I use Win2000 and Linux Mandrake on the same machine, and my editor of choice for windows is now win32pad. All the work that I have to do I use this nice editor. Features that I like the most are customizable colours for background and font and File Format. Last one is really useful for me because I have to work with some txt files in linux and also in windows. I really need this feature, thanx for it.

I also like the Always on top feature.

It would be nice if you do a feature like Change Language (as I seen in RegCleaner or in Windows Commander) and also something like Edit Current Language. I would like to translate the menu in Romanian, my native language.

And a question: where is the Help file? The program can't find it. Is not in executable file?

Anyway, thank again. You did a great job.
Keep up the good work.

It's a great piece of focussed software, which adresses a real need. Keep it simple.

One change I would suggest - The filters for opening files could be improved - at this stage it defaults to *.txt, which is a pain when you are searching for *.py, or *.cpp, or whatever ...

Thanks very much for an excellent program! Very well done!!

There is only one thing I would like changed and it's a big one for me. Hools mentioned it earlier:

"When saving a new file the default directory is always the directory where win32Pad is installed. The ability to change this default, or alternatively to remember where the last file was saved to would be good."

It would be very very good!

Thanks again!

I bow to you.

Excellent editor; I recommend it to my students, link to your site on my Resources Page, and keep a copy on all my working Zip disks as my "portable" editor to use in computer labs and classroom podiums.

Wish List:

1. Escape sequence to insert control codes, specifically page breaks in source code files.
Example: Ctrl-P+L in Win/DOS EDIT.COM

2. "Print Preview" requested elsewhere; I second the motion! Printer abuse and paper waste is a problem in school computer labs and I constantly encourage Print Preview where it is available.

Hi there!
Win32pad is still a great program!
Here is a list of things that maybe could be in a future version of win32pad.

*When click on the save icon when the file is already saved, it could open 'save as...' dialog.
*When opening an empty file and then closes win32pad I do not wont to click do not save this file...
*Bug: When in the change font dialog, change the font and hit cancel (do not hit ok). The font is then change anyway...
*The ability to show the line number on the left side.
*Bug: When I have selected full path in title' and then drag a file from to a shortcut to win32pad it shows the dosname of the file (name 8 char . extention 3 char). If I open the file from win32pad or drops the file in an open window it does not do this. I use winNT.
*Could it be possible to have more than *.txt in the dropdown? Preferably even to have an other as default.
*Tabs in the program window. MDI.

Regards,

Henrik

1) After the file is loaded, or "reverted".......if zero changes is made, the revert button should be disabled.

2) Can we have an option to minimize to taskbar?.....if not enabled, it default minimize to system tray.

3) No sure if this is a bug or feature. But if you search for a string, say "ABCDE", and it is the only instance in the file. After you found it, if the search direction is "DOWN".......there is no response. If the search direction is "UP", there is a prompt of "Search string not found". Keep the "wrap around" feature when searching......it is extremely useful.

4) Could the word "Revert" be renamed as "Reload from file" ?? ....seems clearer (in my view)

5) When revert, the popup window could be more informative.  Eg.  Warning! You have made some changes to the file.  Do you wish to discard the changes and reload? ..........or a simple "Reload from file" in the titlebar of the popup window for revert will be good too.

6) More filters, php, cpp, c, asp, htm*. Remember last filter used.

7) Option to prompt before launching "Execute". There are times where I find it useful to prompt, and times where I dun wan it to prompt. Togglable will be good.  


Keep up the good work !!  

Hello,

You have a nice little program.

Bugs in 1.2.1:
- If the end of the last line contains an url (and highliting is enabled) then the click area for the link extends to the end of the window
- If the following line is empty then selecting a line with shift+down actually selects two lines
- Indent/Outdent command indents also one extra line after the selection
- Indent/Outdent doesn't always work at the near end of the file
- File menu goes pretty wide when there are recent files. Maybe you should cut longer lines (hide part of the directory structure), but some information would be lost..
- Statusbar has the text "Ready...". Why is that?

Small layout suggestion: the text area doesn't need that extra black border in addition to the already present (and sufficient and not so glaring) gray one.

(Following contains some is repetition, sorry)
Features for 2.x:
- Keep size/startup time small -> very important. That is the reason I use this program: it is lite.
- Option to add custom file extensions. (Like many have requested)
- Unicode support (UTF-8, UTF-16 (at least big-endian, maybe little-endian too)). At this time and age this should probably be a must. =) (For more, see: http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets)
- Remeber last save/load directory

Nice but not necessary features:
- Additional user selectable colors: (in addition of what has been said) current line highlighting
- Warning messages should be toggleable: I don't want to be notified of saving when exiting if I didn't have any specific file open that had changes; warnings about large files; files that are binary or contain null characters; etc.
- User customization of the toolbar
- Transparency for the whole program (only works on 2k and XP)
- Tabs for multible files. (Hidden when only one open.)
- Don't include syntax highlighting. There are a lot of syntax highlighting editors out there that might be better suited for coding anyways (for example free: AEdiX Suite, ConTEXT, Crimson, Source Edit, jEdit. commercial: UltraEdit, EditPad Pro). Also this only should be implemented with external syntax highlighting files that could be added/updated/removed independently of the main program.
- If you implemented syntax highlighting then people would also want per language/per file extension macros, external commands (with console output capture) and insertion templates.
- Plugin system with the possibility that plugins could do syntax highlighting, spell checking, external console windows, code structure trees (ctags), etc. would be nice.. but might be freaking hard to do adequately well. (For implementation see jEdit.)

Please ignore few suggestions from xaaran. They counter expected usability.
   - Word wrap option should be accessible from menu. This is used so often that hiding it in options dialog would make it too cumbersome.
   - Drag&drop should open the dropped file. Only if it is just text should it be copied/inserted to the current file.
   - Integration to external email client would probably fail, at least auto copy of the text is impossible. (You could leave the selected text to the clipboard, though.) I have seen text editors that have had internal email clients.. I don't wish to use those. (If there would be a plugin structure for extra features someone could very well make an email plugin. No objections for that.)
   - Autocomplete sounds nice but would work only with customized file extension. I definitely would want to limit the editor to making suggestions to only a very specific case. Maybe only in the case that you press a shortcut key?

P.S. Sorry about the length, errors and hard to read text.  

Couple additions:

If xaaran ment that word wrap just be put under the Tools menu that is OK and recommended. (You know, your current contents of Tools menu could be put under Options menu instead.. But you also could make it a real Tools menu and add user customizable external commands under there.)

Even though I said no syntax highlighting you might still check if using ctags would make this a very easy thing to accomplish. Then by all means add that. (I like syntax coloring.. But there is more to a good editor..   )
And maybe use the same file format for (programming) languages as some of the other free editors so that they would be widely available.. (With the permission of the author of course.)

The first post in this thread was 8 feb 2002. So now we are nearly a year later...

What's the status of version 2.x ?

any updates on this?

Key requests for me are:
1. syntax highlighting
2. the ability to "title" the application window based upon which type of file is being edited (e.g., "C", "Perl", "Python", etc.)

OLE automation would be nice for any new features which you add.