I have used a pretty old 3.x version of Akelpad for quite a while now, as a quick and simple editor. Most of my "heavy-duty" editing has been done with UltraEdit. Unfortunately, UE is getting ever more bloated and slower; what's more I'm experiencing some significant usability issues. So I have been looking into other text editors and, to my surprise, found that the lastest version of AP, plus a few plugins, could do almost everything I need (not least it has now regex support!).
However, there remain a few open points and questions. I am sure some of these can be implemented with the help of scripts; for others, more experienced users may have found a solution or have a hint. Others, I suspect, would need some changes in AP. Anyway, here goes:
- 1. It would be great if copy and cut operations could be made to work on the current line (including its line terminator) if there's currently no selection.
2. Sometimes I am editing program code and sometimes prose. For source code files (*.h;*.c etc) I'd prefer word wrap to be off; for all other uses I'd like it to be on. So it would be great if the wordwrap option could be automatically set according to filetype. I suspect there may be other attributes which also depend on the filetype.
3. In the same vein, a command line option for AP as to which ini file to load would be a great help. (Currently I have copied and patched the AP .EXE file, so the original version still loads AKELPAD.INI and the patched one loads AKELADV.INI. Needless to say, this is not a satisfactory solution.) An added complication here is that plugins tend to have their own INI files, so perhaps the best long term approach may be to have two or more copies of AP installed?
4. I'd like to see the ability to edit column selections, ie adding a string or numbers to a column block. I think there are a couple of scripts around to approximate that, but I haven't looked into them yet.
5. Window positions for the Find and Replace dialogs are stored and reused within a single program run but reset once AP is restarted. It'd be nice if AP would remember those between invocations (as it thankfully does for many other dialog windows).
6. If I want to edit, say all *.H files in a directory, I can't just type "akelpad *.h". Adding a wildcard ability to the command line would be another great helper.
7. Similarly, I have tools to produce lists of files to be edited; a command line option to enable AP to read such a file and open all files in the list would be nice (many tools accept a "@filename" notion for this: "akelpad @filelist" would open all files in filelist).
8. Replace within a selection doesn't work correctly because the selection is reset after the first Find/Replace. This behaviour is no big deal if I want to replace every X in the selection with a Z but it does become a real problem if I want to replace just some X's in the selection with Z's.
9. I am using the Sessions plugin to reload the files open on exit (the "OnExit" options in the Sessions settings). This works fine; however I only want to actually reload the OnExit session files if no file is given on the AP command line (ie AP is started without a filename to open).
TM