Browse All Articles > Rectangular Selection and Line Breaks in Programmer's Notepad
Programmer's Notepad is, one of the best free text editing tools available, simply because the developers appear to have second-guessed every weird problem or issue a programmer is likely to run into.
One of these problems is selecting and deleting columns of text, as opposed to the normal way of selection. One, rather tedious way of getting around this is pasting your text into Excel or a similar spreadsheet tool, and converting the text to columns. To select a rectangular area of text in Programmer's Notepad, simply hold down the "Alt" button and drag. Now you can easily get rid of rogue spaces and characters.
Often web developers and other programmers who have to port code between platforms run into the problem of line endings. The difficulty with this problem is that we are trying to correct a character that is invisible. With Programmer's Notepad, there is a small button in the bottom left hand corner that will display symbols at the end of each line, telling you whether you're using carriage return, line feed or both. What's more, when you save your code file, there is an option in the save dialog to change the type of line break used, so you need never worry about multi-platform development again. The same options are available for encoding, file formats
There are many more features of Programmer's Notepad that I haven't mentioned. You should note that it will automatically detect the language you're using, and colour-code accordingly, whether you're writing Fortran, BASH, C++ or NSIS2 Installer Script. So whatever language you're comfortable with, download it for free from pnotepad.org, and do yourself a favour by putting it on your "Send To" menu. Even if you're not opening a code file, Programmer's Notepad opens anything much faster than MS Notepad.
Here's the link to the website for the software download: http://www.pnotepad.org
One of these problems is selecting and deleting columns of text, as opposed to the normal way of selection. One, rather tedious way of getting around this is pasting your text into Excel or a similar spreadsheet tool, and converting the text to columns. To select a rectangular area of text in Programmer's Notepad, simply hold down the "Alt" button and drag. Now you can easily get rid of rogue spaces and characters.
Often web developers and other programmers who have to port code between platforms run into the problem of line endings. The difficulty with this problem is that we are trying to correct a character that is invisible. With Programmer's Notepad, there is a small button in the bottom left hand corner that will display symbols at the end of each line, telling you whether you're using carriage return, line feed or both. What's more, when you save your code file, there is an option in the save dialog to change the type of line break used, so you need never worry about multi-platform development again. The same options are available for encoding, file formats
There are many more features of Programmer's Notepad that I haven't mentioned. You should note that it will automatically detect the language you're using, and colour-code accordingly, whether you're writing Fortran, BASH, C++ or NSIS2 Installer Script. So whatever language you're comfortable with, download it for free from pnotepad.org, and do yourself a favour by putting it on your "Send To" menu. Even if you're not opening a code file, Programmer's Notepad opens anything much faster than MS Notepad.
Here's the link to the website for the software download: http://www.pnotepad.org
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Comments (1)
Commented:
Most programmer-oriented text editors (not just the one reviewed here) offer columnar/rectangular selection handling. For instance, Microsoft's Visual Studio lets you use Alt+Shift drag to select a rectangular section of the text, and it also provides a keyboard-only method (Press Alt+Shift, then use the arrow keys to expand the selection.)