Results tagged “Notepad++” from CLICK

Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog has quickly become a must-read. His post on The Killer Apps of Academia is well worth bookmarking for future reference.

He mentions quite a few apps I use every day, from the obvious (Firefox, OpenOffice) to the less-so (Notepad++, Audacity).

Among the ones I hadn't heard of but want to try immediately are LogMeIn Free, which, if the description is correct, is like GoToMyPC, letting you control a Windows PC from a remote location, but without the costs involved. There is a "Pro" version with more features, but the fact that there even is a free version warms my cockles considerably.

I'm a simple guy.

In Windows, I used to use Internet Explorer 6 as my FTP client. Yep, you can do that.

And when I installed IE7 after much kicking and a little screaming, I was dismayed to learn that I lost my ability to use the Web browser and a drag-and-drop, fully graphical, albeit extremely simple FTP client.

I quickly learned that the Windows file browser, which I get to by going to Start -- My Computer (since I'm locked out of My Network Places by my paranoid sysadmin) and enter the FTP address as ftp://10.10.10.10 (that's a fake, not-real address for those who are wondering), and then do my FTP work just as I did in IE6.

And yes, I've tried the FTP plugin for Firefox.

I needed a real FTP client for Windows.

I tried a few that weren't free, open-source applications. They included CuteFTP and another I can't remember.

But I'm not happy with 30-day trials, and why pay for an app when you can use FOSS?

I finally downloaded Filezilla, which has FTP clients for Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you've been reading this blog for even a little while, you know I love apps that go across as many platforms as possible.

So far it works great. I set Notepad++ as my default editor, and I've already edited my first file on the FTP server.

So I have a fully FOSS FTP solution in Windows, and I'm happy.

P.S. In Ubuntu and Debian, I just use gFTP, which for some reason I also remember using in Slackware.

I've been all excited about how well the Geany text editor has been working in Windows.

But I never even tried to print a text file with Geany in Windows.

Until now.

First it did some kind of shell command. I don't have access to my shell, per my lovely employer, so that didn't work.

When I installed Geany, I used the "nogtk" version because I already had the GTK+ runtime libraries as a result of installing the GIMP image editor on a previous occasion.

So I reinstalled Geany with new GTK+ libraries. Then I went into the Geany preferences and turned on GTK printing.

It works.

But it looks HORRIBLE.

Each and every letter is separated by two lines in various stages of thickness.

Ugly. Horrible.

I wonder if there's a fix for this.

As it is, I had to return to Notepad++ just to print a text file.

So ... it's back to Notepad++.

I'm a fickle user of applications and operating systems. If something doesn't work for me, I'll switch things up in a minute.

Daily News online leader Ryan Garfat uses EditPlus, which is NOT a free, open-source program, but which does edit HTML exceptionally well. It offers a 30-day trial, then costs $35 for a single user.

But y'all know me. I want FOSS.

So does anybody out there have a favorite free, open-source text editor for Windows?

After having problems with line spacing a couple of versions ago in the Windows build of the Geany text editor, I moved over to Notepad++.

While Notepad++ is a nice applications, I prefer Geany because I also use it in Linux and OpenBSD (especially in OpenBSD, where it's my default editor in X).

But the line-spacing problem was killing me. Using the default Windows linefeeds, I kept getting extra lines in my text files, which was a problem when it came to copy/pasting my text.

Today I downloaded the latest version of Geany for Windows, and the linefeed problem seems to have gone away. I looked in the release notes for the past two versions, and I didn't seen any reference to the problem, but the fact that I can now use Geany in Windows means that Notepad++ will fade to the background for awhile.

I don't use Geany to write hard-core code. I mostly just run it for general writing and a bit of text cleanup and HTML coding. There are probably better editors for heavy HTML coding, and that's something I'll have to look into.

To run Geany in Windows, you need the GTK+ runtime libraries. If you don't already have them, and chances are if you are unsure, you probably don't, download the version of Geany that includes them.

If you do have GTK+ — and I do because I installed it along with the GIMP image editor — use the "nogtk" version.

For Linux and BSDs, Geany is usually available as a package.

Go here for all info on Geany for Windows and Unix-like OSes.

I'll be using Geany in Windows rather heavily over the next week or so, and I'll write about it again in the near future.