TextPad is designed to provide the power and functionality to satisfy the most demanding text editing requirements. It can edit files up to the limits of virtual memory, and it will work with the 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 2000, Server 2003, XP and Vista.
TextPad has been implemented according to the Windows XP user interface guidelines, so great attention has been paid to making it easy for both beginners and experienced users. In-context help is available for all commands, and in-context menus pop-up with the right mouse button. The Windows multiple document interface allows multiple files to be edited simultaneously, with up to 2 views on each file. Text can be dragged and dropped between files.
In addition to the usual cut and paste capabilities, you can correct the most common typing errors with commands to change case, and transpose words, characters and lines. Other commands let you indent blocks of text, split or join lines, and insert whole files. Any change can be undone or redone, right back to the first one made. Visible bookmarks can be put on lines, and edit commands can be applied to lines with bookmarks.
Frequently used combinations of commands can be saved as keystroke macros, and the spelling checker has dictionaries for 10 languages.
It also has a customizable tools menu, and integral file compare and search commands, with hypertext jumps from the matched text to the corresponding line in the source file (ideal for integrating compilers).
This release implements the following enhancements, and fixes problems that have been reported in version 5.2:
Enhancements: Incremental Find command on the Search menu. It finds the next instance of a string, as you type it in the Incremental Find toolbar. Normalize command on Windows menu when document tabs are displayed. It eliminates any tiling and tab groups. Option to order document tabs leftmost first. Option to substitute TextPad for Notepad. Added commands to copy the filename and browse its folder to the Document Selector and tabs context menus. Added commands to create new tab groups to the document tabs context menu. Sets the Explorer path when opening a workspace. Tool names on the Configure/Preferences/Tools dialog box can now be edited by pressing F2. The Explorer now uses the Windows Explorer context menu. Optional toolbar for print commands.
Issues addressed: The regular expression ".*$" could cause a stack overflow. Font not updated when selecting the Clipboard History on the Clip Library. The REDO stack was emptied after a file save. Character case problem with environment variables. Improved heuristics for detecting Unicode files. Line breaks not always detected correctly in Unicode files with non-standard end of line character sequences. Cursor position error on very long lines and lines with control characters. Occasional loss of keyboard focus after closing the Find/Replace dialog box. Reduced the regular expression failure stack size to prevent stack overflow. Text background sometimes not erased on Vista. The Document Selector was not initialised when displayed using the ActivateSelector command. The regular expression parser now traps empty alternate expressions. Too many copies were printed on Vista when more than one copy requested. Very long lines of white space were not rendered correctly. When a window is activated its document tab is scrolled into view if necessary. Slow exiting when the configuration file is on a server with a slow connection. Macro recorder was not closed on exit. Dockable log windows options sometimes didn't work. Triple clicking the document tab close button, displayed the open file dialog box. Clipboard history for non-English versions of Windows.
This release fixes problems that have been reported in version 5.3.0:
Issues resolved:
Help menu commands did not work. Explorer crash on double clicking Desktop item. The Stop Recording command on the Macro menu was not reset if the recorder was running at program exit. underscores were not rendered in Print Preview for some fonts. The IME did not work with the Incremental Finder.
