New
#1
Looking for text editor with tabs, ruler, wrap
Hey guys, got a fairly simple request. I'm looking for a text editor similar to PSPad, that (1) allows you to open multiple documents (i.e. tabbed), (2) has a ruler, and (3) allows you to word wrap to the ruler.
You'd think this was pretty trivial, but surprisingly the several text editors I looked at didn't seem to support this out of the box. Or maybe my goggles are on too tightly.
As you can see in the screenshot, there's a nice ruler there in PSPad, and I've set the text to wrap to a specific column count (which I've highlighted using a red circle, in this case after 144 characters). I was thinking, surely this is a basic feature all the bajillion text editors out there have, right?
Strangely, the text editors I looked at either don't seem to have a ruler, or have tabs for multiple documents but don't allow you to shortcut switch between them (e.g. in PSPad I can hit Alt+3 to view the document in the 3rd tab), or force you to word wrap only to window size instead of letting you pick.
Reason? Well, as you can see in the screenshot, when I play RPGs I like to have guides on hand to look up - I've got 9 open there just for Star Ocean 2. But I'm also playing something else on another console, and I'd like to see the 5 guides for that one too. (Yeah, I'm a glutton.)
I wouldn't mind closing these 9 documents and opening the 5 for that other game, IF I could somehow get PSPad to remember these 9 (and the order they were opened in, i.e. the tab order). I don't know how to do that though, which is why I'm fishing for another text editor.
Ideas, suggestions?
Edit:
It'd be a better idea if someone can recommend an editor which can also remember which files you have open at once. That way, if I want to look at guides for yet more games, I don't have to keep installing more text editors... It'd be awesome if I could just flip between viewing X files for game A, then later Y files for game B, and then Z files for game C, all in the same editor. Way better than having to juggle multiple editors.
Edit 2:
Vaguely thought about projects and files associated with them, but I don't think this is the same thing. In any case, all my documents are lumped in something like c:\docs, and I don't want to organize them (ha!) because there are too many (>5k documents).
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I figure I might as well post what I tested, so here there are, in roughly alphabetical order:
ATPad
Option to highlight the various kinds of whitespace in colour; awesome! Trivial to hunt down those pesky tabs and convert them into proper spaces. Sadly it only wraps to window.
conTEXT
Cool, a numbered ruler like PSPad. Also allows you to specify right margin, however it still only wraps to window width. I'm beginning to suspect "right margin" to most editors means printing margin. Shouldn't that be page right margin, or printing right margin, to avoid confusion? Meh. I mean, why worry about PRINTING margin, isn't this a text editor? If I wanted to mess with printing margins I'd use a full-fledged word processor.
EditPad Lite
I used this before moving on to PSPad. This doesn't have a ruler, and only wraps to window.
Notepad++
Looks ok, bajillions of plugins... but no actual window ruler, the TextFX plugin "ruler" is just a bunch of characters "1234567890" repeatedly pasted into the document itself like some kind of pseudo-ruler. Sorry, not acceptable, the ruler shouldn't be part of the document.
NoteTab Lite
Has a non-numbered ruler plus the option to wrap after a specified number of characters, but does not appear to actually do this. Tested with 120, yep, text still goes on to character 121 and further.
Last edited by Trucidation; 16 May 2011 at 03:35.