I’ve installed Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware, and I have to say that I’m impressed with it. I also installed Edit Pad Pro, and we’re still having issues.
The spyware detection features of Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware are nothing new. I’ve been using AdAware for a while, and it does the same thing. But the real-time protection is pretty cool. Basically, it installs some system hooks that notice when programs write to certain vital system files. I have a good example of the protection this provides.
The DNS server at work is painfully slow to update, and I wanted to access a specific site by domain name rather than IP address. To accomplish this, I edited the Windows “hosts” file, which lets me redirect a domain name to an IP address I choose. Well, you can see how spyware could use this to its advantage.
If spyware ran on your system, it could write an entry in the hosts file that could, say, redirect the URL for your bank to their own server. If their server displayed a page that looked like your bank, you would be completely fooled into submitting your login information to their site.
Fortunately, when I changed my hosts file, the anti-spyware software noticed and popped up a warning asking me if I wanted to allow the change or not. This is good protection.
It also warned me when I trie dto upgrade Macromedia’s Flash player in Internet Explorer. Since I don’t usually use IE, I hadn’t seen Flash in it in a while. When I tried to load a new Flash applet, it automatically downloaded the Flash updater. When it tried to install, the anti-spyware program asked me if I really wanted to install the new component into IE.
In both of these instances I allowed the action to take place with no ill effects. After all, I had told the computer to do these things on purpose in the first place. But it’s nice to know that if I visited a malicious website, and somehow something got on my computer that wanted to do these things, it would be prevented before any serious damage was caused.
Edit Pad Pro… I’ve been dieing for a new editor. I want something with a little more pizazz, or something. Primarily I’m looking for a certain set of features, and I just can’t find them in one piece of software. Edit Pad is actually a reasonably nice editor, but there are a few things that bug me about it.
First, I really hate the foofy XP look. Can’t stand it. So I want my tabs to be .net style. I don’t want hot tracking (changing the background color when you put your mouse over something) on anything that’s not a button - especially tabs. It’s not too much to ask that a program include this option, is it? After all, it’s a programmer’s editor that I’m looking for, not a frilly Office product.
Second, there needs to be a Close Current Document button in the usual MDI client area. I realize that Edit Pad is not an MDI application, but let’s apply some UI design principals here: If in every other MDI-like program I use there is a Close Document button in the top right corner, then what am I going to do/expect from any other similar application? That’s right.
Third, I need the Home key toggle. Push it once, go to the beginning of the text on the line. Push it again, go all the way to the left. Keep pushing it to toggle between these positions. It’s the simplest little thing, but it’s a huge efficiency thing for me. Edit Pad defaults to the absolute beginning of the line.
While I’m on the topid of keystrokes, why can no editor besides TextPad get keystrokes correct? You really need to break words at the regex \b boundary. Every symbol group is a word. Here’s an example of what I mean:
In most programs you can press Ctrl-RightArrow to skip over the word to the right of the cursor. Take the following code snippet for example:
The green arrows show where TextPad stops when you push Ctrl-RightArrow or Ctrl-LeftArrow. The red arrows show where Edit Pad Pro stops. In TextPad, it takes one keystroke to select a variable name when you start with the cursor in the correct position. In Edit Pad Pro, you have to push at least one extra key.
You’ll look at me askance if you’re not a programmer. When you’ve been doing this for as long as I have (possibly not even that long), you’ll come to see why this is a great loss in efficiency.
Fourth, I can’t get used to the searching in Edit Pad Pro. I keep thinking that I will like the “docked” search/replace panel, but I haven’t had a chance to really use it yet. In fact, the search panel is the primary reason why I downloaded Edit Pad Pro - I wanted to use real regular expressions, rather than the pseudo-regular expressions in TextPad. Although the regular expression support in Edit Pad Pro is great, the actual operation of searching is, like the previously mentioned feature, somewhat inefficient.
As far as I can tell you can’t search for highlighted text with a single keystroke, or without showing the search panel. You can select text, press Ctrl-F to put the selected text into the search panel, and only then can you push F3 to search for that text. That’s two keystrokes.
What I want is to highlight text and press F3 to search. If I don’t have text highlighted, I want it to use the last search. I don’t want to see the search panel unless I push Ctrl-F.
Also, the search panel does an annoying thing when using its embedded Search button. When it reaches the bottom of the file, it displays a popup window. This popup window tells you that the bottom of the file was reached and that the search option has been set to start from the top. Every time I see it I think, “Ok, just make a noise and set the option.” See, I want the option to be set, I just don’t want to have to clear the stinking “Option Reset” dialog, which forces me to refocus my mouse onto the popup. Like I said, I’m crazy about efficiency.
One nice thing about the Edit Pad search is the use of Shift-F3 to search upward and F3 to search downward. That is useful and efficient.
Fifth, the loss of the Find in Files option kills me. I tried to replace this with JGSoft’s (the maker of Edit Pad Pro) PowerGREP. PowerGREP is a great program. Unfortunately, it does not fill the small niche of the Find in Files feature that I lose in TextPad.
I just want a simple way to list the lines in files that contain a certain phrase/regex and quickly bring them up for editing. Basically, I want the first tab of PowerGREP and the results pane to be embedded in the editor, and that’s all. When I double-click on a file line in the results, that file should appear for editing. No fuss. No separate program. No crazy replace options.
Otherwise, Edit Pad Pro is a very nice editor. It has a lot of nice extra features. LiveSpell is always cool. The line spacing optons are pretty neat - you can easily convert single to double spacing and vice versa. Bookmarks are numbered like Delphi’s, which is better than TextPad’s stepping through each bookmark. And the hex editor - I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for good, integrated hex file editing that you could toggle.
Edit Pad isn’t a bad program, in spite of my complaining. I suppose I’m just frustrated that something can come so close to the perfect editor for my needs, but fall short on such trivial issues. I wonder if I can persuade the author of Edit Pad to add these options to his program.
