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EditPad – Syntax Highlighting Editor

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This article was contributed by Ferdinand Prantl.

EditPad is free syntax highligting programmer’s editor I’m using heavily at work. And my several friends too :-).

Development environment: MS-VC6 SP3, MS-Windows 98
Target environment: Win32 platforms

Description

EditPad doesn’t bring so much new programming techniques, I’ve just used “the best” of sources at this site and added some my work to make an editor for programmer’s all-purpose usage. I often needed to edit various files in a small SDI editor and Notepad was too simple for me. I wanted to have regular expressions and other useful things. At last I made MDI version too and now I’m writing code in that one instead of in the MSVC IDE ;-).

This editor isn’t full of GUI “beautifiers”. I made it as simple as I considered it to be usable. It’s supposed to be used often for work. Some features of EditPad:

  • Notepad replacement (editpads – SDI version)
  • …pad for more files editing at the same moment (editpadm – MDI version)
  • Printing support (not coloured)
  • Recently used files remembering
  • Different settings for different kinds of files (must differ by extension)
  • Regular expressions for searching and replacing
  • Autoindent and brackets automatic indenting
  • Autocomplete the rest of current word
  • Case changes
  • Using tabs/spaces
  • Highlighting syntax of source code
  • Toggling source/header files in the editor

Some coding techniques

  • Syntax coloring editor component I extended with:
    • more highlighting languages
      (Plain text :-), BASIC (Visual), Batch (MS-DOS), C/C++, DCL (AutoCAD’s DCL), FORTRAN, HTML, Java, LISP (AutoCAD’s AutoLISP), PERL, REXX, Resources (MS-Windows), SGML, Shell script (UNIX), SIOD, SQL, TCL, TEX)
    • brackets autoindenting (ANSI or GNU mode)
    • automatic inserting of the space before left parenthese
    • automatic completing of the rest of current word after the word found in front of or in back of the cursor position
    • opening source/header file which belongs to currently opened document
    • patches and extensions from comments at Andrei’s page applied
  • Notifying about externally modified or deleted files
    (I found two articles about it at this site but no one worked for me. I “discussed” the problem with CFileChangeEvent and MSDN and wrote new class CFileEvent almost from scratch.)
  • Full Screen mode implementation

Distribution form

You can get two zipped archives at the bottom of this page. The first one consists of installable executables:


editpad_exe.zip

distrib/ – files to copy somewhere onto your disk
readme.txt – a short description of the package

and the second one of complete source tree:


editpad_src.zip

batch/ – several files to copy to root of this archive to automate
some developing tasks

both/ – sources for both SDI and MDI versions (with project)
both/ – sources for both SDI and MDI versions (with project)
distrib/ – a placeholder for built executables and help
multi/ – sources for MDI version (with project)
single/ – sources for SDI version (with project)
readme.txt – a short description of the package

You will need following libraries to run EditPad: msvcrt.dll, msvcp60.dll and mfc42.dll.
If there’re no such files in your windows system directory you can get them from Microsoft or from my GUI tools page, where is the link to EditPad primary site too.

Acknowledgements

SDI Sample ImageMDI Sample Image

I have to thank very much all people at this site for their work – I learnt here quite a lot. These persons helped me when I was writing EditPad – thanks them once more:

Downloads

Download executable files – 283 Kb

Download source archive – 343 Kb

History

Date Posted: September 1, 1999
Date Last Updated: January 21, 2000

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