Tag: highlight

Shotty: All In One Screenshots Freeware

Shotty strives to be an all in one screenshots program. It takes screenshots of whole screens, specified regions and windows. It has basic features to edit the captured shots and a few options for places to upload them too.

Left clicking the tray icon of Shotty presents you with capture options for the whole screen, region or specific window (for Windows Vista and 7 a high quality, aero enhanced option is given as well). After the capture a basic editor with a Microsoft paint like interface features things like cropping and adding text, highlights and shapes. A blur or diffuser can hide sensitive parts of the screenshot as well.

Further efficiency can be gained by using the default, but configurable, Ctrl + PrintScreen hotkeys in place of clicking the tray icon for the capture.

Finally the image can be saved or uploaded to one of the chosen locations online, Shotty in turn provides a window with the address of the uploaded image.

Right clicking Shotty’s tray icon exposes its other features:

The upload location can be chosen from one of Images.Devs-On.net (Shotty’s own hosting), ImageShack.us, DirectUpload.net, Imgur.com and UploadScreenshot.com.

The aforementioned hotkeys can be configured and assigned to save, copy or instant upload instead of the opening the capture or image editor.

A history of screenshots taken using Shotty can also be seen.

The optional delay – to take the screenshot – can be changed here as well.

Shotty requires the .Net Framework 2.0 and should run on Windows 2000 and newer versions.

February 13, 2011
PlainEdit.NET Is A Complete Text Editor

PlainEdit.NET is described by its author as

PlainEdit.NET is a text editor for ANSI, UTF-8 and Unicode files

The list of features of PlainEdit.NET are impressive and it is a very complete text editor and notepad replacement. Its features include many of expected and common set like syntax highlighting for many languages and search and replace. But even those regular features are extended in that PlainEdit.NET suports find as you go style search ala Firefox – and only few other text editors. It has such additional features as the ability to choose text encased in HTML tags only. To bookmark a line to be able to return to it any time. To insert such things as the file path, date, special characters and the output of a command line argument. For the latter one can for example choose to output the dir (directory) command to get a list of files in a certain folder inserted into the document. PlainEdit.NET can also paste or input the current clipboard content in various positions in the open file. It can convert text to and from various formats including encoding and case conversion and even to join lines or to eliminate whitespaces and lines that match certain selectable criteria. Under the Extras menu the Configure Shortcuts submenu allows the user to edit or set keyboard shortcuts for such things as launching external applications.

PlainEdit.NET is one of the most feature rich, even beyond those mentioned in this review, and impressive text editors I have reviewed and used, it works well with ANSI, UTF-8 and Unicode files and it requires the host system to be running the 2.0 .NET framework but it is a 526KB RARed portable download. The accompanying help file however is in German only while the product site itself is available both in German and English.

September 6, 2009
Caderno Is Notepad Plus More

Caderno is described by its author as

Caderno is a remake of the common program “notepad”

Another point the author likes to emphasis is that Caderno attempts to re-create a Firefox like experience. One important feature of Caderno that makes the aforementioned statement true, and the program very much Firefox-like, is that it comes with a ‘find as you type’ feature to search .txt or other files. It also features tabs for opening multiple documents. A session management console allows a user to work with a set number of documents and be able to reload them together. The revert feature – found under the file menu – can reload the last saved version of an open document. Caderno also supports PHP code completion, syntax highlighting for a growing number of languages and an improving though yet not full support for utf documents. A portable version is also in the works and should arrive after the author makes decisions on how to handle the program’s built-in crash recovery when working with a USB thumb drive.
Caderno is a relatively young project and a very interesting one, it should run on all more recent versions of Windows.

August 16, 2009
Depeche View Lets You Search For Text Fast

Depeche View is described by its author as

fast search tool loads all text file content from a folder into memory

Depeche View is capable of loading a very large amount of text in seconds and all into one window or instance of the application. In my usage I loaded over 100MB of text files in mere seconds. It does this by loading the files into memory so the program will actually show as a high user in the system’s task manager.

The real strength of Depeche View is in its other capabilities and the number of actions that can be taken with minimal, sometimes one, click. To start, Depeche View is a ‘search as you type’ application similar to that of Firefox’s search therefore eliminating extra typing and dialogue boxes. Some highlights (no pun intended) of the program are described in brief in the following lines. Shift-click on a word and all instances of the word will be highlighted. Right click on one instance of the search results to open a second window showing the search results leaving the original window for other searches or operations. Restrict the search to a case sensitive one by clicking the Case button to the bottom right of the program window. Click the Filter button in the same location to be presented with all and only the lines that contain the searched item. Use Showtab to highlight tabs and spaces in the opened files. Click Bookmk and then Alt-click a word to bookmark all instances of that word.

Depeche View has so many tricks and possibilities and even an Easy Settings button, the round object or button to the left of the bottom menu items. Pressing it deactivates such actions as the one-click search. It is not immediately clear to me why this makes the program easier to use but it is an option to try out.

As mentioned Depeche View has simply so many possibilities that can be played around with. Just as an additional example one can capture a clipboard item and perform a search for it. Read further in the ‘Further reading: help system contents’ section of the program’s homepage.

Depeche View can be used to search inside text files, within a folder, like in such things as source code, logs or simple text files and it can be set to read .bin files and hidden and system files as well, an extended edition can look into archive or .zip and .jar files too. It is freeware and doesn’t require installation.

April 30, 2009