PSPad is yet another text editor which is a good replacement for your windows notepad. Its a nice utility for people who love to write and edit. Though your notepad does the same things for you,this one has many extensive and defined features which you would surely love. It is especially useful for developers, because of its auto complete and syntax highlighting features. Of course, it is not a full fledged web development IDE like Kompozer.
PSPad makes it really easy to do web development and provides visual cues to assist you. It is quite different from other text editors with its unique features like syntax highlighting, eye dropper, color converter, spell checker and many more features which are explained below.
One of its unique features is syntax highlighting which allows you to work carefully. It supports many languages and file types and even lets you define your own syntax highlighting for languages which are not supported by it. It also has an inbuilt FTP client which lets you work on any files on the server so that you won’t need to download any files before editing them. This is similar to the FTP feature available in Notepad++.
Auto completion is yet another feature and as its name suggests it automatically completes your work. There are two ways in which it works ,the default one is Ctrl+J which will show you a list of functions which will complete your typing based on what you have typed. Ctrl+space is another one which does the same and will show you what attributes the function takes.
Here are some more features of PSPad:
- You can work on multiple documents at the same time
- You can compare any files
- It has an inbuilt browser which lets you see what your web page will look like
- HTML Multihighlighter lets you have syntax highlight HTML, CSS, javascript and a chosen language
- You can search and replace text easily
- It has an inbuilt spell checker which supports 20 languages
- Its a portable editor and you can carry it on your USB drive
- It has a macro recorder which records keystrokes so that you dont have to repeat tasks
- It has a Tidy library that keeps stuff clean
- You can get to know the hex/ascii value of any character with ASCII table
- You can see the functions,methods and tags in a file with the help of code explorer
- Hex editor
- You can convert any text to any code or characters to HTML entities
- It supports Mac/dos/unix line endings
- You can easily change the case of characters
- It helps remove spaces and line endings to make the file look smaller
I personally liked some of its features. It allows you to insert LOREM IPSUM text where you can mention how many words you want in a paragraph or between paragraph tags. Eye Dropper is yet another useful utility which minimizes the window and on clicking the mouse it inserts the color that is beneath the cursor. It has a color translator which can convert a color from its name,code or RGB values into another format.
This is definitely an important utility and should be given a try. With so many choices in text editors ,this one should definitely be given a chance to prove its worth.