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Codepad+
The only Notepad replacement worthy of the name

Hardly a day or cyber nanosecond goes by anymore without hearing of the latest 'Notepad replacement'. It hardly qualifies as news anymore. A very few of these are actually very good, but almost none qualify as 'Notepad replacements'.

By definition, a text editor is fast and lean and mean. It's a program you can use to double click text or source code files and view and edit them without having to take a coffee break first.

Find & Replace

The Find and Replace dialogs in Codepad+ are modal - they disappear once you've invoked a search command. Modeless, or 'floating' search dialogs are fine with word processors, but with code editors they should stay out of the way.

Likewise it is necessary to be able to both search in both directions, both up and down, and to repeat any search operation at all at the hit of a hotkey or the click of a toolbar button, whether that operation be a find, a replace, or even a replace all.

Having ample search and replace capabilities is a sine qua non - Notepad allows search and replace strings of only 31 characters; Codepad+ allows strings of 1,000 characters.

Online Help

Being able to relate to context keyword online help is essential. You cannot be expected to fire up that monster IDE whenever you need documentation.

Codepad+ comes with a configurable online help system. Thanks to the new contents files used with both Windows XP and Windows 9x, multiple help files can be linked and cross-indexed and their contents all available at the hit of a key.

Colors, Fonts

People get easily bored with the same old System font and text and background colors.

As tabs can be used extensively in source code, a selection of fixed pitch fonts should be available, and the tab stops should be configurable. Colors don't change the contents of pure text files, so you might as well have fun.

In general, a good system text editor should be as modern in its appearance and interface as possible, without relying on tentative and unstable 'alpha' and 'beta' features or mechanisms not found within the operating system itself.

Saving Settings

Mice are unpredictable critters. Your hand slips and suddenly all those precious minutes of window alignment are for nought - and there's no way out, because the frikkin app is going to save the settings on exit whether you like it or not.

Not here. Codepad+ - as all Radsoft apps - saves its settings only when you want it to.

Cloning, Close All

Codepad+ implements cloning, i.e. creating copies of document sessions. Cloning Codepad+ while editing the file 'XYZ.TXT' will produce a new session of Codepad+ with the contents of the file 'XYZ.TXT' as found on disk.

The whole idea with cloning is to get a backup fast when you are about to make questionable changes you might need to reverse, when you need to test them before actually saving them. Whether it be for compiling or editing configuration files, create a clone before you save something you are not sure of, test the file, and only when it works destroy the clone.

With all your clones scattered all over the desktop, it can be convenient to have a fast way of cleaning things up. Codepad+, as all multiple session Radsoft applications, implements Close All. Invoking this command will close all sessions of an application. Should any session have outstanding file changes, it will prompt you to save these before it closes.

Robust

Codepad+ hasn't been around as long as the original Notepad, only sixteen years, but sixteen years is a long time, and during this time Codepad+ has been worked over more consistently and more often. And it shows - it's 'robust'.

And 'robust' really means 'robust': neither Notepad nor its pretenders could ever survive what Codepad+ has been through, all the cutting, copying, reading in, writing out, pasting in of buffers and files in excess of thirty five megabytes (35MB) - without a tremor.

Notepad isn't the only text editor from Microsoft, although the others have never been in the mainstream. Multipad was once the Afx team's pride and joy, being written with only 87 lines of MFC 1.1 code; Superpad was an upgrade; both were kludges.

File sizes: 11.5KB (Codepad+) 11KB (Winedit).

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