Craig has mentioned TextPad a couple of times now, so I thought it was high time that someone formally introduce it here. TextPad is a powerful ASCII file editor for Windows. It’s a real workhorse. I’ve been using it, day-in and day-out, for nearly 10 years and it’s truly one of the few pieces of software I can’t live without.

It just so happens that TextPad Version 5 was released recently (March 6, 2007), but at the moment it still carries the version 4 pricing ($30 for a single seat license). As before, the trial edition is fully featured, so you can exhaustively try before you buy.

Feature Highlights: To say that TextPad is Notepad on steroids would be a drastic understatement. That would be like saying Superman is merely Clark Kent on steroids. Here is the “short list” of the most notable features:

• Huge Files — TextPad handles huge files well (up to the limits of virtual memory).
• Clip Libraries — TextPad allows you to define any number of clip libraries (i.e. snippets), and hundreds of predefined clip libraries are available for download. There are libraries for every conceivable programming language, protocol, and file format. People have even donated libraries for things like U.S. airport codes. Defining your own clip libraries is as easy as cut and paste.
• Document Classes — TextPad understands that ASCII files come in different flavors with varying characteristics. It handles this using what it calls document classes. Document classes are associated with filename extensions, and TextPad has a wizard for defining new classes. Basically, each document classes has its own default settings for things like tab spacing, wordwrap, fonts, colors and syntax highlighting. Again, hundreds of predefined syntax highlighting specifications are available for download.
• Keystroke Macros — Craig wrote about this in a recent article.
• Spelling Checker — dictionaries in 10 languages.
• Tool Plug-Ins — TextPad allows you to define third-party programs to be added to the tools menu. There are a dozen properties that can be defined for each tool, such as whether or not to save all pending edits before invoking the tool, and whether or not to prompt for parameters that the tool needs.
• Advanced Editing Features — Click-and-drag text movement. Sort using up to 3 keys. Search/replace with UNIX-style regular expressions across multiple files at once. Accumulate bookmarks on a line by line basis via searching, inversion, and/or manual toggling, and then manipulate the bookmarked lines with cut/copy/delete. — Just to name a few.
• Binary File Viewer — Hexadecimal display format.
• Hypertext Links — Open files cited in text using Ctrl+Enter. Jump from file search and user tool output to the relevant source line.

Tip #1: By default, TextPad displays the names of the open file(s) in a pane called the Document Selector; however, most users prefer to use file tabs across the top of the editing pane instead. Pull down the View menu and disable the Document Selector, then pull down the View menu again and enable Document Tabs. The default is for the document tabs to be displayed across the bottom, but there is a configuration option to change them to be displayed across the top.

Tip #2: To get the name of the file that is currently being edited into the clipboard buffer, right click anywhere in the editor pane and select properties. Of all the properties available here, the (fully qualified) file name is the first item. It is selected by default and ready to be copied to the clipboard (Ctrl+C). (Note: In version 4 and earlier, it was necessary to right-click on the tab widget that labeled the file being edited in order to get to the properties option. In version 5, the tab widgets no longer have context menus, so the properties option was moved to the context menu for the editor pane itself.)

Tip #3: The TextPad open function understands file specifications in HTTP format (e.g. “file:///C:/Data/Startup/Daily_Links.htm”). So, if such a file is currently being displayed in a web browser, and you need to edit that file, simply copy the address bar line to the clipboard, switch over to TextPad, click on File | Open, and paste in the file spec.

Tip #4: The TextPad open function also allows for backslashes to be doubled-up. Say that in one editor window you are viewing an error log that contains a message like this: “[client 127.0.0.1] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected $end in C:\\web_project\\header.php on line 171″ To quickly open that header.php file, simply highlight the full path name (”C:\\web_project\\header.php”) and hit Ctrl+Shift+G. TextPad will automatically open a second editor window and load that file.

Tip #5: Not only is it possible to reassign the shortcut keys for any of the functions that you see in the menus, there are many additional hidden functions that can be assigned shortcut keys. For example, the menu has a function to delete the entire line that the cursor is on, but there is also a hidden function to delete from the cursor position to the end of the line.

Pull down the configure menu and select Preferences, then click on the keyboard option. All of the functions that can be assigned shortcut keys have command names like “EditDelLine”. These commands are organized into groups. Select the “All” group to see all of the commands at once.

Commands can have multiple shortcut key assignments. For example, the Ctrl+Shift+G shortcut mentioned in the tip above is assigned to a command called FileGoTo. You could assign it a second shortcut of Ctrl+Enter (which is a pretty standard shortcut for this type of function in many programmer IDEs), and then use either of the two shortcuts to invoke it.

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