Friday, March 27, 2009

My text editor. Notepad++ comments, macros, and new line replacement

For years my text editor was Programmer's File Editor (32-bit) by Alan Phillips. It has a macro recorder and simplified regular expression search and replace, which enabled me to do amazing on-the-fly data conversions. But since I discovered Notepad++ some years ago, I have gradually converted all my computers to use it. It has syntax highlighting, code collapsing, and miscellaneous powerful tools like line sorting and tab/space swapping in a menu called TextFX.

Since I started using Notepad++, I have had three main problems:

1) How to search and replace carriage returns.
2) How to change the comments font to a regular size and to a monospaced font (like Andale Mono, Courier New, Lucida Console, and Monospac821 BT).
3) In recent versions, macro recording and playback seems squirrelly, which really cramps my programming style.


Solutions

1) Search and replace across multiple lines using the CTRL+R special search and replace box and CTRL+M to insert a carriage return into that box. Please leave a comment if you have any trouble with this.

2)Change the comments font to regular size and monospaced font (you may need to install the latest version to find this option) at the following location:

Settings,
Styler Configurator...,
Language: Global Styles,
Style: Global override
[x] Enable global font
[x] Enable global font size

3) I haven't solved the squirrelly macros yet. I hope an upcoming version fixes the problem.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have never been able to get the Macros to work for me.

Whenever i record and same more than 1 macro, all macros magically change to the content of last saved macro!!

Thomas Gail Haws said...

I am sort of an on-the-fly-macro kind of guy. I never save macros. So I haven't noticed that behavior. Sorry I can't confirm. I do wish that Notepad++ had a development team and not just a lone ranger programmer. Issues like yours need a community to address them.

Thomas Gail Haws said...

For a writer, I think LibreOffice would be better.