gHacks technology news » text editor

Microsoft Word: Jump To Last Cursor Position

Martin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:45:01 +0000

If you open a Microsoft Word document you will notice that it will always open with the first page of the document being displayed. That’s fine under most circumstances but could be problematic for users who work with large documents if they cannot remember exactly where they left off at the last time. Microsoft Excel on the other hand remembers the cell that has been last edited by the user for every sheet of the Excel document.

Here is a tip on how to get the same result in Microsoft Word. The easiest way to make Word jump to the last cursor position in Microsoft Word documents is to use the keyboard shortcut [Shift F5].

Pressing [Shift F5] in a recently launched Word document will place the cursor at the position of the last change in the document. Word will only record changes to the document this way. Simply placing the Word cursor in the Word document is not enough to make [Shift F5] jump to that position.

The other requirement is that the document needs to be saved in doc format. Word cannot perform the jump to the last cursor position if a txt or rtf document is loaded into the text editor. This little keyboard shortcut can be very useful in large Word documents that are edited over time.

Distraction-free writing with PyRoom

Jack Wallen — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:59:24 +0000

Let’s face it, sometimes it’s just too hard to get work done with so many distractions coming at you on your computer. Email, youtube, facebook, shopping – it all adds up to one huge time suck and threaten to perpetually keep you from your work. There are times when I need to concentrate on work – on writing. For those times I need to get rid of all the distractions. With Linux there are a few ways to do this. I could go to console login and use a text-based editor so there is no GUI around me to interrupt. Or I could make life a bit easier and install an application that will help to get rid of those distractions.

One application that does this job very well is PyRoom. PyRoom is a simple to use application that serves as a text editor that takes up your entire screen. There are no window decorations, or minimize buttons, or anything that will get the application out of the way – unless you close the application. So for those who need a distraction from the distractions, PyRoom just might do the trick.

Because you are using a text-based editor, you should expect that the files you write in PyRoom are going to be flat text files – in other words, no formatting. Of course you can always open that text in your standard word processor and doctor it up all you want. Now, let’s take a look at installing and using PyRoom.

Installation

As you can imagine, the installation of PyRoom is pretty standard. Since this is a text-based editor, let’s install from the command line (instead of the GUI). Here are the steps (for installing within Ubuntu):

Open up your terminal window.
Issue the command sudo apt-get install pyroom.
OK any dependencies that will be needed.
Watch the installation fly by.

That’s it. After PyRoom is installed you will find the executable menu entry in the Office sub-menu of the Applications menu. If, for some strange reason, you can not find it you can always open the “run” dialog with the F2 keyboard combination and then enter the command pyroom to start the application.

Using PyRoom

Figure 1

When PyRoom starts you will see a nearly blank screen (see Figure 1). Here you can see I have added a bit of text just so you can see how PyRoom looks. What you will also notice is the complete absence of everything you have grown accustomed to with applications. That’s the whole point.

The first thing you will probably want to do is get to the help menu. All commands are executed with the help of the key. To get to the help menu hit the combination h which will give you a listing of all the possible commands for PyRoom.

One of the cool features of PyRoom is that you can keep multiple buffers open so you can work on more than one file at time. To move back and forth between buffers you would hit the Page-Up or Page-Down. Either of those will move you between your buffers.

Of course the most important key combinations are s for saving and q for quitting. You can see the entire list from the help screen.

A few configurations

Figure 2

If you hit the p combination you will bring up the Preferences window (see Figure 2). In this window you can configure a few items (you can see the General configurations in Figure 2). You can also configure a theme for PyRoom. From the Theme tab you can choose a preset them or you can create your own personal theme.

Final thoughts

I am a big fan of minimalism and zero distractions. Of course using today’s desktop, it’s practically impossible to avoid all distractions when you’re trying to concentrate. PyRoom offers some respite from the usual suspects and allows you to concentrate on your work – not your Tweets and Facebook status.

Tags: console, text editor, text processing, writing

Dasher Offers An Alternative Text Input Method

Martin — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:33:45 +0000

The majority of computer users use a combination of a computer keyboard and computer mouse for text input. Some make use of lesser popular and specialized text input methods that include touchscreens, motion capturing devices, tablets or joysticks. The software program Dasher adds another very interesting albeit specialized data input method that can be used with one or even no hand at all. The fastest way of using Dasher is by using the computer mouse but it is also possible to make use of a motion tracking device to use no hands at all.

Data, that is text mainly, is entered in Dasher by moving a pointer to the appropriate chars that appear on the right side of the application’s screen. The developers claim that experienced users can write up to 39 words a minute when using the computer mouse and 29 when using a motion detection device. It is probably better to visualize the way it works, below is an animated gif explaining the concept.

Dasher has been designed for situations like these:

when operating a computer one-handed, by joystick, touchscreen, trackball, or mouse;
when operating a computer with zero hands (i.e., by head-mouse or by eyetracker);
on a palmtop computer;
on a wearable computer.

It basically works by moving the pointer on the character boxes that appear on the left side. Dasher is using language predictions to determine the most likely and less likely chars giving the most likely chars more space in the interface. The program will also learn over time so that new words become easier to write the next time.

Users who want to try out Dasher should know that they need to spend quite some time before it becomes easier to work with the software program.

Tags: dasher, text, text editor, text input, text software, windows software

Full Screen Writer Write Monkey

Martin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:25:02 +0000

Write Monkey is a text editor that offers several unique features to stand out of the masses of other writers and editors. The first and probably most noticeable feature is the full screen mode which displays a black screen without any text editing buttons and toolbars except for the main menu bar. The light green text is perfectly readable on the background. A right-click in the interface will open a menu that lists all the available options that are at the writers disposal including switching between full and window mode, switching between text and repository or enabling so called jumps.

Jumps display bookmarks, paragraphs and headings of the text in a separate always on top window which makes it convenient and comfortable to navigate the text. The colors and pretty much any design parameter can be changed in the program’s option to allow the user to select his own fonts, colors and page layout.

The repository which was mentioned earlier is not part of the original text but is connected to it. It can be filled with ideas and text that is not yet ready to be included in the real text document. Texts can be saved in text format only with the option to export markup – like bold or italic text – so that it can be viewed correctly in web browsers and word processors.

Another interesting feature is the progress bar which can be used to define a text length which is often required when writing journalistic texts or essays. The very same menu contains countless statistics about the text that has been written so far and a function called sprint writing which will limit the writing time. Both the text progress and the time limit can be displayed in the main interface.

Additional features:

Customizable Printing
Spell Checker
Multi Monitor Support
Firefox Integration
Auto Backups, History
Replacements (add predefined text by writing shortcuts)
Bookmarks

The main problem that many writers will face is that the document can only be saved in text format which might require a few additional steps in another word processor to save the document in another format or to beautify it before publishing it or sending it in.

Write Monkey (via Tech Yard) is a portable application for the Windows operating system that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0 or higher

Tags: portable software, text, text editing, text editor, windows software, word processor, writer

Text XML Editor Intype

Martin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:59:25 +0000

Intype is a text, code and xml editor for the Windows operating system that resembles advanced editors like Notepad++ in many aspects. It features the same extensibility and customizability as the popular Notepad replacement including scripting support and native plugin support.

There is not a noticeable difference performance wise considering the program startup time and text loading performance. The Intype text editor uses a tabbed interface to display multiple text documents in the same interface. Plugins – which are called bundles in the editor – are available for various programming languages to add better support in the editor. Support is build in for programming languages like C, PHP, Java and various other scripting languages like HTML, XML or CSS supporting language grammar snippets and additional features.

The project’s website contains downloads for additional bundles that can be added to the text editor. The editor is currently in alpha stage. It can be freely downloaded from the developer’s website. The FAQ states however that the editor will not be free once it is fully released.

Intype might be worth a look for users who use plain text editors for coding purposes. It does not however provide access to powerful new features or commands that other text editors like Notepad++ do not offer.

Tags: code editor, editor, intype, notepad, text editor, windows editor, xml editor

Ghacks Christmas Giveaway: UltraEdit And UltraCompare

Martin — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:19:49 +0000

We are giving away three licenses for the editor UltraEdit and the comparison tool UltraCompare today in the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway.

UltraEdit is a text editor at its core and one could mistakenly think of it as yet another Notepad clone. While it still provides the speed of the default Windows text editor it comes with an impressive feature list that beats most – if not all – other text editors in Windows fair and square. Yes, that includes Notepad++ and the likes. That’s of course only true if you need the additional features that it provides. The feature list includes syntax highlighting, code folding, Unicode support, spell checking, ftp & sftp browser, ssh. macro engine, html building and customizations among others.

The editor provides professionals with the tools needed in their job. Webmasters and web designers who do use text editors and not a web designing software will find the features offered indispensable. UltraEdit provides syntax highlighting for web standards such as html, php, xml, javascript or css including a html file validator that checks if the code is W3C compliant. More than 500 wordfiles can be downloaded from the official homepage to add support for additional programming languages from Assembly languages to C++ and World of Warcraft Lua. The integrated ftp & sftp browser makes updating files on the Internet a breeze. Add to that a dockable SSH / Telnet window to access a remote server command line right from the editor.

Versioned backups ensure worry free editing as files can be backed up before changes are committed to them. A file comparison tool can be used to compare different versions of a file to highlight the differences.

Additional UltraEdit features include:

Configure word wrap and tab settings for different file types
Organize and access local or FTP files with projects.
Hex, Unicode, Large Files support
Integrated Scripting Engine
Customize nearly every aspect of the editor
WebSearch Toolbar (Wikipedia, PHP.net, MSDN..)

UltraCompare is a powerful file comparison tool that can compare files and folders with each other. Two or three binary and text files can be compared with each other at the same time and it is possible to merge the differences of the compared files. The folder mode supports both local and network directories and jar / zip file comparison. It also offers the means to merge the differences between compared directories.

The interface will display the text files that are compared visually highlighting the differences. Tabbed sessions allow to run multiple comparisons at the same time int he same window. The folder compare displays the folder structures next to each other using symbols and colors to highlight the differences.

Additional UltraCompare Features include:

Differences navigation
Multiple merge options
Relational lines
Isolate lines
File Editing
File Compare Profiles

You can grab a copy of UltraEdit or UltraCompare by leaving a comment below. Tell us what you currently use for file editing and text comparison.

Tags: file comparison, ghacks Christmas giveaway, notepad replacement, source editor, text editor, ultracompare, ultraedit

Remove Unneeded Text With Text Trimmer

Martin — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:01:52 +0000

Removing unneeded text from a text document can be a speedy or slow process. It’s relatively easy if the text that has to be removed is not linked to other text that should not be removed, say paragraphs of text. It becomes difficulty if the text that should be removed is merged with text that should say. One classic example is a html link list. Extracting only the urls of the links would mean to cut the beginning html tags and the end tags from the text document which would mean some work in a text editor. The find replace function could be helpful but it still means a time consuming process.

Text Trimmer (via Shell City) is a text editing tool that has been designed for that purpose. It comes with different modes that can be used to easily remove text from documents. It makes use of two modes Block and Mass that can remove unneeded text from documents easily.

The Block mode can be used to mark a block of text in a text document that can be removed, copied or moved. It would for instance be possible to remove the first 20 characters of text from every line in the document which is not doable in normal text editors.

Text Trimmer can do that with just a few clicks. The combination [ALT Left-Mouse Click] selects the upper left starting point for the block, the next use of the combination selects the lower right end point. Everything in between will be marked by the software program.

The Mass mode on the other hand is rule based which means it can be used to mark blocks based on rules defined by the user. It is for instance possible to mark all lines starting, showing or ending with the < char or trim all text from the beginning to a certain character.

The operations are easily accessible and it usually takes only a few seconds to define the text that should be trimmed and remove it from the document. Text Trimmer is a portable software for Windows.

Tags: edit text, portable software, remove text, text editor, text software, text trimmer, windows software

Learn Microsoft Excel: Smart Paste

Martin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 08:23:06 +0000

Ashish Mohta posted an interesting Microsoft Excel tip at his website that explained how to smart paste contents from Notepad into Microsoft Excel. The procedure is actually working with any kind of text editor not just Notepad.

When you normally copy paste contents into Microsoft Excel they will all be stored in the same cell in the Excel application. That is usually not the desired way of presenting the information. It is possible to copy and paste the contents into other cells or prepare the text in the text editor in a way that the contents are automatically copied into separate cells.

Pasting text into different Excel cells can be done by making use of the TAB key in the text editor. Pressing Tab represents a new cell in Excel when pasting the contents into Microsoft Excel. To create a four column layout in Excel one would simply write down the name of the first column, press tab, write down the name of the second column, press tab and so on.

The same holds true for additional rows. Just make sure to press tab only once even if the contents do not match in the text editor they will in Microsoft Excel. So even if the columns in the text editor will not look even they will be perfectly fine in Microsoft Excel.

Tags: excel, excel tutorial, Learn Microsoft Excel, microsoft, microsoft excel, notepad, text editor

Extend Notepad++ with Plugins

Martin — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:37:29 +0000

I have never paid much attention to the plugin support of Notepad++ until today when I went to the official download website to notice them for the first time. You all know that I setup my new computer and one of the applications that I cannot live without is Notepad++. Several of the listed plugins sounded quite useful and I thought it would be great to point other users in the right direction.

Adding plugins is a breeze. Notepad++ comes with a plugin folder that is a subdirectory of the root directory of the installation. Just place all downloaded plugins into that directory and they will automatically be recognized by Notepad++. If the plugin directory is not existing create it. The plugins can be configured from within Notepad++ by clicking on the Plugins menu in the toolbar.

The removal process works the same way, just delete files in the plugin directory to remove a plugin that you do not want to use anymore.

The main plugin page lists 26 plugins for the latest version of Notepad++. Here are the ones that I found useful and decided to install:

XML Tools – XML Checker. Can auto-close tags and provides other useful features.
Hex Editor – adds a Hex Editor to Notepad++
Compare Plugin – compare two text files.
FTP Synchronize – modify and upload files directly to a ftp server.
Multi Clipboard – add up to ten text phrases to the clipboard.
Windows Manager – great if you work with many open windows at once regularly.

Those are just five of the 26 available plugins. Most have been written for special purposes and are probably not useful to the majority of users.

Tags: notepad, notepad replacement, notepad++ plugins, text editor, Windows

Ultra-Pad a Wordpad replacement

Martin — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 20:01:58 +0000

Wordpad offers an advanced functionality in comparison to Notepad but is not able to compete against Office suites such as Open Office or Microsoft Word. Ultra-Pad is a Wordpad replacement for Windows which adds several features that Wordpad does not offer. It can be enhanced with themes for instance, an option that Wordpad does not offer.

Ultra-Pad is able to read the most used text formats such as txt, rtf and doc which is unfortunately only available if a version of Microsoft Word is installed on the system. It’s a pretty advanced editor with dictionaries, thesaurus, drag and drop and all features that are offered by Wordpad.

I personally like to use an editor like Ultra-Pad when I want to edit formatted text fast. It does not make sense to install an application like this if you have enough time to edit in Word or Open Office though.

Read More:

Ultrapad Homepage

Tags: open-office, text editor, ultra-pad, word, wordpad

AbiWord Open Source Word Processing

Martin — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 17:44:13 +0000

Are you looking for a free lightweight alternative to Microsoft Word and Open Office ? Are you sick of endless loading times and office suits that occupy hundreds of megabytes of space on your hard drive ? AbiWord might be worth a closer look if you answered those questions with yes. What´s so different about AbiWord that I would recommend it ? There are several reasons, first it is only about five megabytes in size which is a good prerequisite for a fast loading application.

AbiWord is open source and available on many platforms including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac Os, FreeBSD and others. The open source tool is able to read and write all important formats like Microsoft Word, Open Office, Word Perfect, Rich Text, web documents and more. This is ideal if you want to import files from different sources and work with them at. Plugins enhance the functionality tremendously, there are currently more than 50 free plugins and tools available as additional downloads from the AbiWord website.

Tags: abiword, freebsd, Open Source, plugins, text editor, Windows, word

AjaxWrite – Write Documents Online

Martin — Thu, 11 May 2006 11:18:34 +0000

AjaxWrite is a superb demonstration what Ajax can do. Ajax, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is a web development technique for creating interactive websites. AjaxWrite offers the basic functionality of programs like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice for free on the web. No need to purchase, download or install anything. Open the website and you´re ready to go. The only requirement is firefox 1.5 or newer, the operating system itself does not matter.

The application is able to load and save Microsoft Word, OpenOffice and many other text formats. The website itself is imitating the look of your favorite word processing software with all the standard options available as well. (for instance different fonts, paragraphs aso.). This is also great if you are in dire need of converting a file into a different format, for example .doc into .txt format. Give it a try, its great.

Tags: ajax write, documents, text editor, write online

Freeware Notepad++

Martin — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 10:39:08 +0000

Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement) for Microsoft Windows personal computers. The freeware application supports many programming languages like C, C++, Java, C#, XML, HTML, PHP and Javascript. It has many useful features that Notepad is lacking, some worth mentioning are auto completion, the ability to work with more than one document and a multi-view feature that shows two documents at the same time. (that you can edit of course).

Tags: notepad, notepad replacement, software, text editor, Windows

gHacks technology news » text editor

Microsoft Word: Jump To Last Cursor Position

Related posts

Distraction-free writing with PyRoom

Related posts

Dasher Offers An Alternative Text Input Method

Related posts

Full Screen Writer Write Monkey

Related posts

Text XML Editor Intype

Related posts

Ghacks Christmas Giveaway: UltraEdit And UltraCompare

Related posts

Remove Unneeded Text With Text Trimmer

Related posts

Learn Microsoft Excel: Smart Paste

Related posts

Extend Notepad++ with Plugins

Related posts

Ultra-Pad a Wordpad replacement

Related posts

AbiWord Open Source Word Processing

Related posts

AjaxWrite – Write Documents Online

Related posts

Freeware Notepad++

Related posts