Court - Basic - VB Files

Netpadd is an HTML-related text-editor. It's an enhanced Notepad with additional web-specific functionality. It is suited if you so far use Notepad for web-related editing needs, like HTML, XHTML, CSS, JS, ASP etc. It is meant for those who use Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer (and all the other browsers) for their webpage-editing environment. The program doesn't replace your knowledge of the standards, but at times it helps you remembering the syntax. It does help for repetitive tasks. And it loads as fast as Notepad on the computers I tried. I've been using the program for all my text editing needs on a constant day to day webprogramming basis for several months now and it seriously speeds up my work.

Enhanced functions

The functionality besides what Notepad has to offer:

File

The file size isn't limited to 60.000 characters. Also, you won't get black blocks when opening Unix style end of line characters.

Make and Load a backup. Nice if you want to save a certain state the document is in, to get back to it later on. In the meantime, you can still save your "normal current" version of the document with Ctrl+S
Revert to the last saved version

Edit

Copy and paste to a Second Clipboard.
Select all with the Ctrl+A short-cut.
Replace something in the document, optionally case-sensitive, optionally just in the selected part.
Delete tag

Extra

Wrap a tag with the needed element. For example to copy a paragraph from word into your HTML, you press Ctrl+Q in Netpadd and type "p".
Or you have a complete untagged list in your HTML. Select it and choose wrap tag - "list" to automatically create the <ul> and <li></li>.
Jump to a selection. For example a "href". Or press F9 to open up the associated stylesheet directly. Or Ctrl+F9 for the linked JavaScript/ Shift+Ctrl+F9 for an included ASP file.
Java compile the current document/ Java appletview it.
Switch the case of a word, or all the tags, to upper or lower
One-liner create a single line out of several-lines content.
Convert a word to a filename ("This File" -> "this_file"). Or to an ID/ name. Or to HTML.

View

Press Ctrl+F1 and the Document tree dialog displays your document hierarchy and can be used for limited validation. Did you leave any tags open? Did you nest a block element inside an inline element?
Now I make an unclosed <div> tag right here in this document. This is what happens:
```
...
|   |   |   |___ul
|   |   |   |   |   
|   |   |   |   |___li
|   |   |   |   |   |   
|   |   |   |   |   |___em
|   |   |   |   |   
|   |   |   |   |___li
|   |   |   |   |   |   
|   |   |   |   |   |___em
|   |   |   |   |   |   
|   |   |   |   |   |___br
|   |   |   |   |   |   
|   |   |   |   |   |___div

 CANCELLED:
 </li> appears which is not opened
 at this part of the document 
```
The document tree creator also creates a warning if the tag is not allowed in the document type (Strict, Transitional, Frameset in HTML4/ XHTML1), and if the element is allowed to be nested that way (note: I use A Real Validator for, well, real validation).
XML Tree generates an expand & collapse style list of your XHTML1 page (or other XML files). It also alerts errors.
Goto row and Show row help you to locate the buggy JS line.
See the CSS Properties if you're unsure how to un-italic an address. Was it font-type? text-style? font-style? Or text-type?
View special characters.
View language codes.

The optional auto-complete feature shows a quick list of harder-to-remember syntax: for example if you type "<!DOCTYPE ", there's some doctypes on the list, and choosing the first one results in
"<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN">"

The optional ASP Hiliting colors server-side scripts real-time in blue, commentaries in green and other HTML in black.

Download

Available for download are:

Netpadd installation files (ca. 2.75MB zipped)
Netpadd project source (ca. 50K, needs VB6 to run).

If you want to replace Notepad on NT, there's 2 Notepad.exe's on the system!

Version 1.0

Last update: October 15 2000
Added user-defined command execution in Extra menu

Older changes:
QML hiliting added

Help

There is no official help-file. If you have questions on parts of the programs, send an email.

Distribution, Copyright & Credits

Netpadd is open-source and freeware. If you like any parts of it, copy them into your own project. Please see the copyright notice on the Court Intro page for more information if you want to redistribute the program in whole or parts.

If you add helpful functionality to the program by the use of additional VB forms (note: the text should only be accessed through the public oPadText object, a class wrapping the actual text field), please contact me.

Netpadd is not Netpad (which is a trademarked name for something else).

Credits

The following sources were used for reference, help, code and inspiration:

XML Tree: based on Xmltree from VBXML/ VBOpenSource
CSS Properties: found a dialog I liked in TopStyle 1.5
Language codes: ISO 639 codes from the SGML/XML Web Page
Miscellanous help at comp.lang.basic.visual.misc

Thanks to WebReference's Michael Claßen for mentioning this tool in his XML column Editing XML: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Basic - VB files - Netpadd