Dolphin Text Editor Menu (Version: 2.7 as of this post) is an enhancement and efficiency tool that works with most text editors and browser text areas such as MS Word, gmail, forum reply text areas, most if not all text editors and more. It applies or adds formatting, sorting, aligning, reversing and lots more to any text being worked on. Some examples of its features are remove blank lines, align text, append text – this adds text to the end of each line – convert to plain text, word count and get file names – this copies file names of selected files into the clipboard – and many more.
Dolphin Text Editor Menu sits in the tray and works in addition or in conjunction with the text editor or browser. The default keys to launch it are Ctrl+Numpad0.
DesyEdit (Version: 3.5 as of this post) is a tabbed text editor. It also features syntax highlighting for HTML, C++, SQL, XML, PHP and others. Additionally it includes FTP support to work with documents within DesyEdit and HEX and column editing as well.
DesyEdit becomes even more useful with its bookmarks, macros recording, case, tab and space conversions, full screen mode and print preview capabilities. It can also ‘print all open windows’, stay on top and open documents in read only mode.
DesyEdit is worth a consideration when looking for freeware editors.
DocPad (Version:10.0 as of this post) is a text editor and an enhanced alternative to Notepad. Beside the typical plain text editing it offers the following and more.
Adding or removing indentations. Bookmarking specific lines. Jumping to a specific line. Removing extra spaces. Converting case. Converting between formats like Base-64, UTF-7 and others. Dragging and dropping files or chunks of text. Spell checking.
DocPad has built in calculator, calendar and character map tools as well.
Snap DB is one of the 2011 entries in Donationcoder’s N.A.N.Y. (New Apps For The New Year) challenge. It is a simple database program that holds and organizes lists and information in a text like or flat structure. It is minimalist by design.
The uses for Snap DB are pretty much infinite. Keep a list of albums, software or books or anything else all with many a column to hold information about them. Open the program right click on the columns to rename them and to add additional columns as necessary. Then double click on a row and start entering the information. Import a Comma Separated Values (CSV) or tab delimited file to use with Snap DB or export the data to a CSV file. Activate the Filter mode (View—>Filter Mode) to search the data and get results as you type.
Snap DB has a few built in shortcuts to make entering information easier. For example use F2 to edit a record or F5 to duplicate a record. The usual Ctrl-C Windows copy key combination will copy whole row(s) of data in SnapDB ready to be pasted anywhere with each column separated by a tab. Conversely copying some tab delimited text and using Ctrl-V in SnapDB pastes them into columns. Also notice that when adding or inserting data there is Run button, that button will execute if the corresponding field has a URL, mailto or path to a file or folder in it.
Snap DB is freeware, portable, no install and is less than 700KB unzipped. Watch the screencast on the program’s site to see it in action and follow the thread and suggest other features in its DonactionCoder forums thread (linked above).
MemPad calls itself a text outliner. It is more precisely a freeware 140KB download which is a notes organizer, one which stores notes in a tree structure.
It offers basic features for fonts and colors, auto save – in minutes increments and/or automatically as text is entered – search (and replace) across all notes and the ability to export notes. It does have some more advanced features like internal linking between notes (highlight and right click to create links) and linking to system files or programs which can be used to launch anything from web links to executables from within MemPad.
With a F6 click (or Page —>Diary Page) MemPad creates a diary page for the current day and therefore it can be used as a structured diary program. It is also possible to move nodes and child nodes or pages up and down to restructure the tree. Additionally a page can be locked to provide temporary protection against accidental edits, a sort of read only format. It is also possible to encrypt a page to keep it away from prying eyes.
MemPad can do more via the Lookup.txt and Launcher.txt files found initially in its Examples folder. The chevron button on the far right of MemPad’s toolbar can be turned into a launcher by populating the Launcher.txt file with statements like Calculator;calc.exe for example – to launch the system calculator. Lookups, done via right clicking highlighted text, can be added with entries like Wikipedia;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/$ for example – to look up the highlighted word in Wikipedia. Note that to use the lookups and the launcher the Lookup.txt and Launcher.txt files must be moved from the Examples folder to Mempad’s root folder.
MemPad is more powerful than its size or ‘text outliner’ description may indicate. Its help file has more, from how to modify text margins and date formats to how to more efficiently work with its launcher and lookup features.
Texter – not to be confused with Lifehacker’s text substitution and expander Texter – is a lightweight and attractive text editor with a few extras.
Texter’s few extras are as follows:
Encrypt a text file via the file menu.
Zoom in and out via the view menu.
Change the case to upper or lower and copy file name or file path to the clipboard via the edit menu.
Access to clipart, symbols, images and text from external text files via the insert menu. Date can also be inserted from one of many formats via the insert menu.
Change colors and fonts and create bullet points via the format menu.
Preview text in browser mode. Load a XML file or open the document browser via the tools menu.
The program options, accessible via the tools menu, include auto detection of URLs, configuration of the auto save setting, customization of the toolbar and others. A number of shortcut keys, such as InsertSymbol = Ctrl + F3, GoToChar = Ctrl + G and others are also available and viewable in the options.
Texter supports *.rtf as well plain text files, should run on all recent Windows versions and is GNU general public license software.
AH Note is a young entry in the notepad alternative universe. AH Note’s capabilities are all visible via its icons around the program interface. Its features, those not common to all simple notepad alternatives are listed below.
Copy options to copy the current file name and path. Indent selected text by 1 column increments. Add bullet points to selected text. Add images to any text document. Zoom in and out of pages. View the page in a browser and finally convert selected or all text to lower or upper case.
AH Note can open many text files formats and save them in its own native *.aht format in addition to *.txt, *.rtf and others. AH Note is obviously a young project, one area which makes that clear is the tool tips (hover the mouse over menu buttons). As of this review – version 1.0 – some tool tips are not properly labeled and are still the likes of ‘ToolStripSplitButton’, a mark of the programming language used to code AH Note. AH Note is one self contained executable file that doesn’t require installation, just download it and run it.
Ultra File Search does what it’s name suggests, it can search for files and for text inside files too. It can do that not only for files residing on local drives but for files on other drives such as on a DVD or on an USB key.
Ultra File Search supports masks for filtering the search into a number of specified criteria. These criteria include not only the more common date and size masks but also less common attributes such as read only, compressed, encrypted, temporary and others including searching system or hidden files.
The ‘Containing Text’ tab can search any words, all words, as phrase and other criteria such as restricting the search to a matching case. Here it is also possible to bypass media, image, system and hidden files so as to not waste time searching for text inside them. It should be noted that Ultra File Search does support searching inside EXE and DLL file formats.
One additional and potentially time saving feature is the ‘Append Results’ one. Checking this option makes it possible to keep any displayed search results visible when additional and subsequent results are performed. Therefore various search results can be combined into one results window.
If needed parent or containing folders can be opened from within the program. Results can also be exported into various (plain, tabbed, csv, HTML and XML) text formats. Ultra File Search is available in a portable edition that can be run from flash or USB drives. Ultra File Search is freeware and runs on Windows NT 4.0 and newer versions.
CleanHaven is an utility made to clean lines, paragraphs or passages of text. In doing so it has the potential to save time and many a headache. Any text pasted into it’s window (see image) can be operated upon in several ways and a results window, after clicking the clean button, presents the finished and cleaned text to the user.
Some of its features are as follows:
Case: This includes the likes of ‘Title Case’ to capitalize words, ‘Sentence Case’ to start new sentences capitalized, convert to uppercase and convert to lower case.
Sort: This works with words or sentences as if they are individual entries in table cells. Words can be sorted in ascending, descending, case, random and other orders.
Duplicates: This removes duplicates or shows or hides duplicates.
Remove: This has a lot of options. They include removing extra spaces, extra returns, spaces, punctuation, non numbers, non letters and more.
Personal: This converts text into several formats such as separating first and last names into an indented position ready for emails, letters or documents.
Info: This does word count and others. It also does something resembling a spell check called ‘Only Correct Spellings’ and ‘Only Incorrect Spellings’. In my tests this did not work, the presence of a ‘words’ file in the program folder notwithstanding.
CleanHaven’s Replace tab does the traditional find and replace operation. The Settings tabs let you view text in tables, this helps if the input text has tabs since tabs are used to differentiate and place text into different table cells. Consequently one can choose to work on certain columns only.
Results can be exported into *.txt, *.xls and *.csv formats. CleanHaven is also available for the Mac and Linux and is a capable efficiency and productivity freeware.
ClipCube, until very recently known as Clipbox, is a small and minimalist clipboard utility that keeps an unlimited (?), until recently up to 2000, number of clipboard items for future use. The program runs in the system tray. ClipCube lets the user decide how long it keeps clipboards on file, this is set by right clicking the program icon and choosing the Keep Items entry. The available options are keeping the item(s) until the program is exited to keeping them indefinitely. The program window or interface has settings for pinning or keeping it on top and also choosing to show a full preview of a selected clipboard item or not (by toggling the eye icon on or off). One other option is showing a time stamp beside each clipboard item, this lets a user know when the clipboard was captured.
ClipCube also supports hotkeys (see http://clipcube.wikispaces.com/Changelogs for a full list of hotkeys as they are added to each version) that ease program usage such as Enter+Ctrl+C to copy a selected clipboard item and Ctrl+Numpad[1-9] to choose the first to ninth entry in the listed clipboard history. The latter did not work in my test of the current version (0.2.2) and additionally brings up the question of how one may be able to choose the 10th, 11th or higher numbered items in the clipboard history list.
ClipCube is GPL licensed software and does not require installation. This program is in development and the interface and options have also changed recently so this review may be outdated in some respects by the time you read it.
