marek's Profile

Member since January 5, 2008

  • Name

    marek j

  • Location:

    Poland

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Recent Posts

  1. Review - Beyond Compare

    2.4.3 Build 243 (Jan 5, 2008)

    Fast, convenient and reliable. Now, inline editing would be much nicer than the separate edit boxes at bottom, and I would love to have merge buttons for individual blocks, like in Araxis Merge - but then consider the price difference. At this price, Beyond Compare deserves full 5 star rating.

  2. Review - EditPad Pro for Windows

    6.3.2 (Jan 5, 2008)

    A little slow to start up, a little too garish with the profusion of colors and icons (though the colors can be tamed).

    Some basic options missing (e.g. strip trailing whitespace on save; place backups in a designated folder; minimize window when closing last open file, clicking in the gutter does not select line, etc).

    So-so syntax highlighting (try EmEditor for ultimate power). The nicest-looking code folding I've seen.

    A little off-putting self-promotion on the part of the author, and when I've already bought a program, I certainly don't want to see any "buy this too!" come-ons in the menu (Regex Buddy, get lost!).

    Not too efficient with large files (30 MB+), but EmEditor is worse, especially with line wrapping on.

    Poor macro design. Macros are stored in INI files, so technically they can be fine-tuned by hand, but just look at the structure and run away screaming. INI files are a truly awful choice for storing scripting sequences!

    Fair Unicode and UTF-8 support, though for UTF-8 files it can either always add or never add the signature, which makes EditPad Pro useless for the kinds of files I work with (the editor should always respect the presence or absence of signature in existing files).

    The worst thing about EditPad Pro: the find/replace UI. Now, as far as search functionality goes, it is absolutely the very best, it is awesome. Fantastic support for regular expressions, with syntax highlighting within regexes. I love the ability to fold results and show only matching lines. The problem is that instead of a dialog box, EditPad Pro uses a separate pane. This means a completely non-standard operation: to toggle regular expressions, you cannot press Alt+E (or Alt+X, or whatever), but must use a menu command. Even for incremental search, EditPad Pro opens the darn separate pane, from which you have to ESC - how silly is that? It's a totally different paradigm, nice for mousing around, but hopeless if you want fast keyboard access to all the features. The way it is, it's a usability nightmare to me.

    (This, by the way, is symptomatic: PowerGrep by the same author is easily the most advanced GUI search application for Windows, and it is utterly unusable. The UI is so dense and cluttered, configuring one search takes ages, while I can achieve practically the same effect with a couple of keypresses in TotalCommander. Fantastic features packed into a UI horror pill.)

    It needs many improvements but relatively small ones, nothing major (except for the macros, which should be re-implemented from scratch). Almost great, but due to the UTF-8 problem is sits unused on my machine.

  3. Review - UltraEdit

    13.20a (Jan 5, 2008)

    UE may have been top of the line at one point, but today its age shows. Completely broken syntax highlighting (try XML!), no "document classes" (groups of settings applied per file type), and nagging usability issues like no Yes to all/No to all buttons when closing editor with many files open and changed. The latest version has a nasty minimization bug too, where UE minimizes to taskbar but does not release focus - you still need Alt+Tab to actually switch to another application.

    My rating reflects the one high point: as far as I've been able to test, UE correctly recognizes and supports UTF-8 files with and without signature, and does not add the signature to a file that originally didn't have it (doing so would break builds with some files I have to work with). Apart from EmEditor (which has its own issues), UE is only Windows editor that handles cleanly all UTF-8 and Unicode files. Well, maybe VI does too, didn't check :)