TextStudio Development (10th November 2006)
I quite like TextStudio. It doesn’t have snytax highlighting, or UTF-8 support, or a whole of other things you’d expect in a modern text editor. But it does have some neat features for working with lots of files at once. It uses a classic MDI setup which seems to have dissappeared from everything except Opera...and that has big tabs as well.
I originally built it to work with hundreds of static web pages at once, before I even heard of PHP and include(). But even now, I still find myself sometimes working with several text files and find most editors don’t provide the range of simple window management features I need. Sure, they’ve got flashy interfaces and stacks of useful features, but they are missing things I like.
So I’ve continued developing TextStudio privately, adding new window management stuff and lots of HTML editing shortcuts. I haven’t released a new version of it for ages since it really needs a major rewrite to modularise the code and tidy the whole thing up.
But I added a file list sidebar in the last two days, integrated it with the preferences system. It’s resizable and even collapses to a narrow bar like really fancy editors have. I’ve also done some successful tests with Regular Expressions, so I think TextStudio can continue to be progressively enhanced and remain my editor of choice. Even though nobody else would like it, it’s my baby. c{:¬)