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Now THAT would shut them up!

There are ups and downs to many solutions out there. One of my current projects involves XML files and migration into databases (Oracle or MS SQL - both commercial) larger than the application memory limit on 32 bit windows machines let alone the (practical) limit on any editor. Since I'm stuck having to use windows, I needed a solution to split them up, so I had a perl script (free) written that does the job beautifully. The files would be hard to manage if there were too many of them, so the sizes are still large. (70-100M) TextPad (commercial) or saxon-b's XQuery engine (FOSS) to run searches and analysis, but if I am doing anything simple with XML app configuration files, transforming table name lists into SQL create scripts, or non-XML text processing, I use Notepad++ because it's simply better than TextPad AND free, but doesn't handle larger files easily. While our main product is MS SQL-based, our internal project tracking system is MySQL/PHP/Apache with a dash of MS SQL (we have bulk licenses anyways) for convenience.

Anyone who's worked IT (not just tech support) knows that FOSS practically is your trade, or you'd go broke in license fees. Sure, where I work we have some commercial products we work with, but much of the bulk of the business core is custom-built and on platforms we didn't have to pay for. Using the equivalent reasoning of smart business decisions only becomes a problem to the MAFIAA companies when the decisions are in the public eye. (government) Heavy users of IT (including those who work IT) should be using the least costly, most agile solution. Sorry, but that means that a lot of commercial firms will lose out. That's market forces for you. People who whine about that aren't so much capitalists as casting themselves as an obsolete feudal lord in the 21st century. If you're main trade is moved in on, you either adapt and become better, or become obsolete. This is what software is all about.

The only problem I see with mandating (as opposed to recommending) FOSS everywhere might be slow development in the long run but could make software writers more free agents who get contracted at the drop of a hat to interpret and expand a dead project that they built infrastructure on. Much like civil engineers obtain contracts.

In 1993-1995 I recall using (at work) a fairly early, pre-Office version of the Word. It had the fountain pen on the splash screen. I don't remember exactly what was the release name, but I suspect it was Word 6.0 (1993.) It worked quite well. This is why it pushed competing products (WordPerfect, AmiPro etc.) out of the way

Did Word push compeating product out because it was better or because it came bundled with PCs? I bet it's the later. Many people buying computers want it to come with software such as an office suite bundled, they don't want to buy software separately then install it. The exceptions would be specialized software and games. But the only suite most OEMs will offer bundled is MS Office. Actually I bet if I look the only suite the major OEMs will bundle with Windows PCs is MS Office.

MS WordPad

On Windows I preferred TextPad. Then again within it I could compile and run Java programs, preview html, PERL, and other things. With WordPad the commandline or another program was needed.

StarOffice (which I tried) was a strange thing. On one hand, it had excellent functionality that Word never had to begin with. On the other hand, it was too complex for most users. Add a few bugs, and the recipe for disaster is ready.

What I hated, yes hated, about StarOffice was it took over the whole desktop. I tried it then went back to Word 97. After Open Office replaced it I waited a few months before trying it, and it did what I wanted without getting in the way.

You see why MS Word, being priced at a few hundred dollars, quickly appeared to be a great solution to our problems?

WordPerfect didn't have those problems, and for a while it was the most widely used office suite.

Falcon

The idea is that it's very easy to switch from "Layout View" (WYSIWYG) to a nice color-coded HTML view, and from there to previewing it in your browser(s) of choice. I don't think the author in this case got the idea.

TextPad is no-nonsense Windows text editor with tons of functionality. Almost like a user-friendly vi for Windows. It won't replace an dedicated IDE (even though it has some configurable IDE-type functionality), but I use it every day for other tasks. One of the very few programs I've paid the registration fee for.

Definitely my favorite editors, powerful and small.
texpad.com - for text/source editing
hextreme - for hex editing.

The whole TextMate bundle thing is a great idea, but I think requiring cygwin is a bit too much. And it makes for a good dev editor, but as far as working with text the thing to measure all things against is still TextPad, IMO.

wtf!!!!!!
textpad!!!!
LOOK AT THIS
http://www.textpad.com/products/textpad/screenshot s/index.html

I'm sorry but that is too much crap html in that screenshot for me to take that program seriously!

I wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole because of that screenshot.
And if I did touch it with a 10 ft pole it'd be to beat the snot out of it.

For batch changing I have found Advanced Find and Replace to be very effective. I had to update a none standards compliant site that didn't use CSS to standards compliance with CSS recently. The site had about 15000 pages at the time, if I remember rightly, but it was quite painless updating it with Advanced Find and Replace.

For HTML, CSS and PHP editing I use TextPad. A great text editor with syntax highlighting and other tools that make writing code easy. For checking the page I use Firefox with Web Developer plugin, Opera (my main browser) and, grudgingly, IE.

Rather than UltraEdit32, I always swear by TextPad. It's just about the first thing I install on any computer I'm working on - hell, I even paid for a license!

OK, most of the time it's just minor-annoyance nagware, but I figured, I use it so much, might as well pay them for some kind of use.

The only other thing I absolutely swear by for HTML/CSS is BradSoft's "TopStyle Editor" for CSS. Yeah sure, I can use a text editor for the same thing, but TopStyle makes my life easier.

Previous posts have mentioned Perl and PHP; seconding those for high-intensity search-and-destroy missions. As for software, you can't go wrong with TextPad, WinSCP, and PuTTY.

For best practices (separation of content from structure from behavior, mostly) keep an eye on are listed in and around A List Apart and the Web Standards Project. And if you're looking for several sets of outstanding presentation and behavior tools, check out the YUIBlog and the Yahoo! Developer Network. (Hint: their page grid layout, font normalization, and CSS reset libraries are an excellent place to start.)

There's also Notepad++ and TextPad, both similar to Notepad2.

BTW: I use an editor called textpad, which is quite a pack! http://www.textpad.com/

Having just completed my first year of university studying Computer Science, I have used nothing more than Notepad and Textpad for Java, whilst using LCC, vi and pico for C.

In all honesty, I've found these perfectly adequete. Using a full IDE would really be over the top for what was needed.

I second Microsoft Power Toys and add some more:

* AutoIt for simple automation tasks and creating small programs with graphical user interfaces

* Firefox, of course. Opera is also a good choice.

* Daemon Tools for mounting ISOs as virtual CD/DVD drives

* Trillian--AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, and Yahoo messenger client


* QuickTime Alternative

* RealPlayer Alternative

* IrfanView--small, free, fast image viewer



* SysInternals utilities--useful for admins

* Scanner--shows hard drive usage as stacked pie graph of files/folders

* 7-zip: similar to WinZip or WinRAR or StuffIt

* Foxit [PDF] Reader--a lite alternative to Adobe


Following ones aren't free but are very useful Windows-only programs:

* FinePrint--n up printing, universal print preview, etc.

* MaxiVisa--use a networked computer like a secondary display

* TextPad, though I opt for the open-source and FREE SciTE

1. TextPad is a must.
2. The Windows Power Toys are worth taking a look at (I personally like the 'Open Command Window Here' tool).
3. Azureus for BitTorrent.
4. Windows Grep comes in handy for searching files (No thanks Google Desktop).
5. And of course, Visual Studio Express to get your hands dirty with some code.

If you plan to use it for development, you can't go too far wrong with TextPad and WinSCP.

You might also find Tunebite useful, if you subscribe to any online music services.

The only valid point that I thought the article made had to do with Word documents. It's no secret that interpretting Word documents is haphazard at best (just look at OpenOffice) and that standards need to be documented more thoroughly. Almost everything else in that article seemed like nit picking, and for once I feel bad for Microsoft.

They can't win: if they include Windows Media Player with their OS they get sued, if they don't include it they get hundreds of thousands of complaints from users and even more Microsoft bashing than before. If they include Active Directory with their OS they get sued, if the don't include it they get thousands of complaints from administrators and even more Microsoft bashing than before. The list goes on and on. As for Outlook being bundled with Office, I think that since Office is a suite consumers pay for (either in retail channels or through OEMs), Microsoft should be able to include what it wants to. Outlook is part of the suite, plain and simple.

Next week's top story: "TextPad Sues Microsoft for Bundling Notepad with its Windows Operating System"

Yeah, but why would you use Dreamweaver? Textpad and a browser all the way, baby!

adjusting to anything else would seriously hinder my productivity, for a couple of weeks after which it may improve significantly.

I like vim for command line and something like textpad for GUI text editing. I've never tried Emacs, but then again I don't do a huge amount of text editing.

I'm sorry that you fail to perceive yourself in a way that allows you to adapt and use potential benefits that are presented to you because you cling to the present and don't accept the future.

1. Don't you have a guest login? II also expect that your PC is different enough to your friends (different version of windows, different version of office, differentiffer applications installer), I have very little problem using other people's PC, even windows ones and I've been using only Linux at home for years.

it would be nice if Microsoft provided a way to export you personal settings so that you can take them with you.

2. WFT? Unless there's a bug in the menuing system (the menu system is only a small part of the OS so it should be easy to fix any bugs in the first service pack) how is your usage pattern going to cause instability? Please I'd really like to know where your going with that one.

3. I hope not, ref it would be nice to export your settings in #1. If you do have to suffer than that's Microsoft's fault for not implementing smooth upgrades not the fault of intelligent menus.

4. So make it possible to turn the feature off and on, hey you could even have different profiles depending on the work your doing.

5. Generally if you don't use a PC enough for the algorithm to work then your always going to be learning how to use it, I don't think intelligent menus are going to cause too much of a problem and you could always turn the feature off. But your problem implies that those people who do use a computer enough for the algorithm would benefit.

6. See #1, and it is possible to share profiles over the network so that when you logon to another PC it's just like you like it (even down to the wallpaper), I think it may be possible to export your settings to a USB key and then import them when you use another PC. (It's been a while since I've used Windows, but under NT is seemed possible so I expect more recent version s of windows would be better)

I think you've found quite a few exceptions to prove the rule, I didn't say that Microsoft's system couldn't be improved upon all I said is that if you give it the time (like you have to give anything new some time to learn) it will benefit you and not hinder you.

Want an example of what I consider to be a good interface? Have a look at Vim.

I use vim all the time, though I only new a few commands for years. About a year or so ago I thought it would be a good idea to learn a few more commands and went through vimtutor.
It has some quirks (like having to escape ('s etc.. when searching because vim uses regexps to search etc...) that take a while to learn, but once you've learnt Vim it can be very usefull.

Notepad can use GVim after learning one additional bit of information.

Except when you paste with the mouse it has a horrible habit of double indenting everything unless you tell it your going to paste. (that's Vim maybe not GVim, I usually use VIM in the command line)

If you want to see a really good editor look at textpad, it's simple, yet powerfull.

I always used to use the commercial TextPad but recently have been swayed by PSPad.

I like Textpad or in a worse case scenario VIM but that is worse case only.

Just stay out of the template visual designer and you'll be alright. Use the open with context menu to open as[pc]x files with your favorite text editor such as textpad or emacs.

IMHO, once you get off of the visual designer, then VS.NET and Eclipse are about the same in quality.

There was netbeans and eclipse, which looked identical to me. I never could use either of them because I did not have a good enough system (PIII 1ghz with 512 megs). A friend with a slightly faster system and 1 gig of ram was able to run it.

And the learning curve to eclipse was pretty high for all the functions it had. At least that was my impression trying to run. But I gave up on Eclipse fairly quickly.

At the time, I was using textpad http://www.textpad.com/, and it was awesome for a while. But I soon found I needed more features than just compiling and a nice error report. I needed something to keep track of programs that were multiple classes.

I wish I could remember the name of the program. I was like textpad, very clean, no extra anything from a basic instal. But what made it different was you could import new modules (functions). Instead of having an overwhelmin experiance with Eclipse, that has everything built in, the cool thing about the blah-bare IDE was if you wanted a specific tool, you could import it and learn it. Later if you needed a second tool, you could import it. It kept the IDE clutter free.

Now why would anyone want to use a "pirated" version of TextPad? I've used it for years and have legally downloaded updates from TextPad.com. with no problem. Maybe every several saves I'll get a nag popup, and eventually I may pay for it, but other than the nag it's perfectly legal to download, install, and use without paying for it. Though I've got MS Word I still use TextPad more. Another good text editor is Crimson Editor. I've got XMLSpy as well in the Home edition which was free, it did require registration but then they email you a key to unlock it.

Try TextPad and Zoom Player.

Textpad is what you are looking for.

Indeed, you should've switched to http://www.textpad.com/Textpad long ago...

You are welcome to download a copy of TextPad for evaluation, or to upgrade an earlier release. There is no charge for the download, but you must pay for the software if you decide to keep it.

sorry the link to text pad is TextPad

xpy, firefox/thunderbird, 7-zip, nettime, winamp, mpc, gaim, mp3ext, textpad, nsis hope that were ten ;)

and for Linux - postfix, squirrelmail, screen, apache, mysql, squid, php, courier-imap, rsync, cvs - in no particular order

posted this list at my blog too - First Ten Programs

Winzip - Yeah, you know what this is

Editplus - Possibly the best editor ive found, not free im afraid, costs around $25

VLC - Free media player

SmartFTP - Great free for personal use FTP client, not found a better one yet!

A fine text editor!

Actually, there are a couple of free IDE's for the .Net world.

Microsoft offers a *FREE* ASP.Net development IDE called ASP.NET Matrix available at www.ASP.Net. It's geared towards code writing, so you don't get a great WYSIWYG HTML tool, but you can do some pretty cool stuff with it.

For a Windows Form IDE, look at SharpDevelop which is currently in Beta release .99b :-). It's open source (GPL) so if it doesn't work, you can fix it. I haven't looked at this one in a little while (beta .95), but it looks like the development team is rolling right along, and in fact, I'll probably download a copy of it today for evaluation. I'm a VS user, but actually write *a lot* of C# test code fragments in TextPad.

I'm sure there are others, but I've actually used those two IDE's (well, three if you count TextPad :-) and would recommend them.

Because for $5 a month, you are 1. supporting the music you care about and 2. not in danger of being attacked by rabidly litigious riaa stormtroopers. There will always be people who participate in copyright infringement, that isn't avoidable. The point is to try and bring the masses into a system that is reasonable to everyone.

I don't see a point of such service since such commercial "opt-in" centralized services, like iTunes, are already available. If iTunes cannot deal with the problem, how can this imaginary system? "There will always be people who participate in copyright infringement" is not a good answer - since that's the status quo now; i.e. that new system won't change that in any significant way.

Most people don't mislabel their mp3s or wmas or aacs on purpose, why would they? If that kind of fraud appears, it would be easy to simply actualy listen to a sampling and determine the %age of fraud.

Who said intentionally? Some people don't care about artist name, some don't care about song names, others don't care about any names, only categories. Who is going to pay for sampling for every possible filename variation of every single song to come up with the final count of songs "traded?" Besides (what you conveniently ignored), how are these downloads going to be counted anyway, if the system is not centralized? Note the quote from the proposal:

Figuring out what is popular can be accomplished through a mix of anonymously monitoring what people are sharing (something companies like Big Champagne and BayTSP are already doing) and recruiting volunteers to serve as the digital music equivalent of Nielsen families.

First of all, BayTSP and others are mostly monitoring what people are sharing - what people are sharing and what people are dowloading are 2 very different things. Second, how would the volunteers be designated? How can you guarantee in a P2P system the "volunteer" service won't be abused? All you'd need to know is where these volunteers are to pipe your downloads through them? Third, even if you assume it won't be abused, it still is not an accurate count by any means, not even close to it. Especially for the small guys who may not be counted at all, thereby giving up their share of payments to RIAA's bigger labels. That's not fair at all and does not support music - it only supports RIAA!

If you RTFA you'd note that they specifically address the movies/software aspect (these industries are not suffering as badly, are adapting to the new technology better, and have been less litigious..plus there is nothing to prevent this strategy from working with movies & software as well.).

Unfortunately, I did RTFA, and I don't think the proposal is going to work for movies or software at all. In fact, it would be even worse in those industries. On the surface, it seems acceptable that EFF proposes dividing revenues equally among "rights holders" adjusted to their respective content popularity (i.e. songs). However, with regards to movies, and especially software, popularity does not always determine the price. Out of $1000 in revenue, if you determine that Textpad has been downloaded 30 times and MS Windows 2k3 - 20 times, would it be fair to give Textpad $600, and MS - $400? Even though Textpad costs much less that Win2K3? You could say - it should also be adjusted to their respective prices. So, then Textpad could say their software is worth $50K per copy online but freely downloadable through P2P, so they get a bigger cut of the shared pie?

This system will never work as it's been proposed, especially for movies and software!

Again, in the article, they suggest a sampling technique be used to estimate popularity, and that it be done by a non-profit group (in the vein of ASCAP, BMI & SESAC, organizations designed for a similar problem of new technology and musi

Your best client, Harvey, calls. "Joe", he says, "Our new marketing guy says that the web site needs to be fluid... it needs to expand and contract when people resize their window. Can you have it done by next Tuesday?"

"Er, uh, sure", you stammer. You hang up the phone, curl into a fetal position, and you want to die... on Monday. There are 283 pages and each one contains a fixed-width table. If it takes five minutes to edit each page, it'll take TWENTY-THREE hours to edit them all.

You can prevent this from ever happening to you again if you use CSS to control your tables.

Thing is, WordPad is a Word processing program. Shouldn't be used for writing any actual text files that you parsed as such.

Textpad, which is very useful shareware program and the best text editor I've seen around.

I found the first half of the book to be simply horrible. A supposed introduction to actually using Eclipse this section concentrates more on the "Agile" toolset that all competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process should already be using. Well, that's what all the books say anyway.

If you read and work through the first six chapters, you will

• Quickly and easily set up eclipse on your favorite platforms
• In a couple days be competent enough to move your day to day work to eclipse with few or no hassles
• Set up CVS on windows or linux
• Point all of your eclipse installations to the CVS repositories you created, and use CVS as your repository via eclipse menu commands
• Integrate ant, log4j, and junit with eclipse

I've tried a good deal of the stuff listed. The following are the most intuitive, free, software products I have encountered. They increase productivity, and are stable.

Freeware List: If you can think of it, it's in here.
OpenCD: Precompiled CD with all open source software.
Doom9.org: Famed site for lots of media tools.
Trillian: AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo! IM software all in one.
AVG Anti-Virus: Free AV
SpyBot (Spam Remover): Free Spam Remover/Search & Destroy
Firebird: Web browser w/ adblock & popup control.
FileZilla FTP: FTP Client
Smart FTP: Free Client, better looking, faster
Kerio: Personal Firewall, better than ZoneAlarm
Textpad: Text Editor.
PuTTY: SSH Client.
CygWin: Linux emulation.
FFDshow: DivX/XVid decoder.
TweakUI: Microsoft's famed Powertoy for Windows XP.
WinAce: Fast, high-compression (40% smaller, faster compression than ZIP).
WinAmp: MP3 player, with this skin.
dBpowerAMP: Music Converter (copies CDs to MP3)

One last thing, don't use Outlook. Find a better program: Eudora, Thunderbird, or PegasusMail (in that order) are safer/more powerful. Windows comes bundled with great software, just like Mandrake - but their internet package leaves much (security) to be desired.

Total Commander
Personally, I can't tolerate the pathetic excuse for a file manager that is Windows Explorer.

And while we're at it, Cygwin is a handy thing to have.

As for the rest, everyone has their own preferences for image viewer, text editor, universal IM client, IRC client, etc etc etc.

Mozilla, powerful and free web browser/mail suite.
OpenOffice, powerful office suite.
Ad-Aware for keeping spyware (Gator etc) out.
BitTorrent for all your P2P needs.
ZomeAlarm a good firewall.
Avast! Antivirus good AV app, free for home use.
TextPad powerful and easy-to-use text editor.
SmartFTP powerful and free FTP client.

On top of these, I always install these non-free apps (non-development related):
Paint Shop Pro all the relevant functionality from Photoshop at a much better price.
Klient the best IRC client. Ever.

Some people have mentioned:
CygWin - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it
VNC - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it, and it has security issues
Dev-C++ - not needed on a home PC, it's for development.
NetHack - huh!?
Boingo - the article submitter didn't mention anything about having a WLAN card, so why would he need to find hotspots?
Winamp - redundant since Microsoft released WMP9, which I've found to be just as fast, more stable than WA3, and better at playing movies. Of course, YMMV, and some people prefer to stay away from MS stuff for ideological reasons.

...are the SysInternals tools just in case I want to be serious about what the box is doing, and the Textpad editor in case I want to be serious about editing.

And it's never a bad idea to have the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer handy.

Some free, Free and not so free applications:

Webbrowser Mozilla Firebird (Win / linux)
Email Eudora (win) Evolution (linux)
Office suite OpenOffice.org 1.1 (win / linux)
SSH client putty (win) openssh (linux)
Videoplayer VLC (win / linux) or BSPlayer (win) and Xine (linux)
Editor Textpad (windows) Kate (linux)
Chat Jabber PSI (win / linux)
Firewall Kerio (win)
Anti virus F-Secure (not free) (win)

- Ost

Just to add to the drivel, I use TextPad every day for everything from simple text files to Perl scripts to HTML coding and anything else the crippled NotePad can't do. Regular expression search-and-replace (even in files), sorting, blocking, spell checking, syntax highlighting, and a whole other list of included features. And it saves it all in plain old ASCII text files (DOS or UNIX formatted). Of course, it includes saving in UniCode but we won't go there.

As a professional writer, I use a lot of different tools. Several of my books I've used MS Word, because the publishers had special templates and macros they used in production that weren't easily ported or usable in other software. (I know, I tried it.) On other stuff (aka 'submitted but not published' works) I've used TextPad, OpenOffice, and Power Writer . TextPad lets me write without getting any programming or interface nonsense in the way; OpenOffice lets me compose more complex documents with footnotes; and Power Writer contains plot, character, and idea databases that help keep all my reference details in one place. All good, all for different reasons. Except Word. I'm not very fond of Word.

My 70yo dad loves it and so do i, best text editor on a windows platform ever (and it runs in WINE too :)
www.textpad.com

For win32 you could use TextPad. It's notepad on steroids. It has syntax highlighting for Java, C, C++, html. It can compile java using the installed jdk. It is fairly small, leightweight and fast.

I've used Eclipse on W2K and it just plain rocks, but it's (AFAIK) very Java-specific. Maybe there's a good web development plugin for it though. Eclipse is an impressive piece of software (OT, I know).

Perhaps we should all just use LYNX. Or as REDHAT would likes us to use LINKS. WTF? I mean do we really need competing command line text only web browsers.

Christ.

Next it will be incompatable rendering of underscores inlu of a Horizontal Rule.

Then we will have Text-Only browers built into the shell. Thats when linux will become as (in)secure as windows.

We already have a text browser in EMACS. WTF! Why does any one want to use emacs ... Ctrl-F-Alt-Space-Enter-Q just seems fucked up ... but I guess emac ppl like it painfully HARD.

WTF.

What a SAD WORLD. We all should use VIM - Or install windows and use TEXTPAD. FUCK EMACS.

As for Mozilla project names - how about PORTZILLA or GRITZILLA.

In Soveit Russia, web-browser names YOU!

PROPS TO RYAN - He uses VIM!