At first this tool might look like just another ordinary text editor that doesn’t stand up with anything new and i’m not saying that it does, either. Some features that seem to be of real help are the Find and Replace functions because they let you extend your search and replace “in all documents”, as most of other text editors don’t let you do that in multiple files simultaneously. The possibility of searching in all the opened documents is of use especially when you are debugging some script that’s spread in several files or you just want to find where a certain variable is used in more than one file. When you search for a parameter in more than one file and that word or phrase is found, a nice arrow indicates the line where the parameter is located in every opened file. The single disadvantage is that you need to check every one of the opened files to see which one contains your parameter. It would have been a lot more nice to highlight the files that contain the searched entry.
I can’t say that the interface isn’t user-friendly as it’s structured on tabs, has some very intuitive drag and drop options for moving the side panels arround. The thing that every side panel has the option of being hidden or always on top is also great. A nice advantage if you edit some project based files is the Explorer module that gives you quick access to the files you need.
I think that TextPad (as well as many other text editors) is in lack of a module that would permit it to connect to a host via FTP and edit the remote files like if they were local files. Another useful feature is the “warm start” that will let you continue your work from where you’ve left it, but nowadays this is a must-have for every text editor. The workspace can be defined and saved so that you may set up a custom workspace for each type of file you edit, this too isn’t a new feature.
A nice feature which not all text editors have, is the chance of bookmarking some key lines. After you toggle a few lines as bookmarks you can cycle between them (even if they are in different files). This thing is really great because it helps you understand the code.
Vital shortcut keys are already set up: increase/reduce indent, upper/lower/invert case, but you can go even further and customise them as you can set up some macros that will help you get the desired effect in the shortest amount of time. Of course there are some default macros that are available but just need to be activated. A nice undo/redo function with unlimited number of records is also at your discretion.
A big disadvantage TextPad has is the fact that is doesn’t suport skins or some kind of templates that might be of use when editing different kinds of files to highlight for example some ifs and elses.
You can choose to define different document classes in order to set up a proper developing enhancement. Just to make sure that nothing bad happens you can activate the backup option that will create a backup of the edited file just before the changes are applied.
Overall this look to be a strong and stable text editor with some basic features and a couple of enhanced must-have modules. It’s not really at the head of my preferences list but if i didn’t had any alternatives i think TextPad would be ok. So much for this text editor at the moment.
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