So, back when I was in school in programming class (IT in high school, dunno how it is in other countries, but here there are these courses in public school if you want to get specific knowledge of something before college, instead of going to 10th-12th grade of a generic curriculum, you can for 10th-12th grade in IT or Media and a few others, I think they have ended those since, pity)…
As I was saying…
(700 words of nothing)
Back when I was in school in programming class, we got an end of year assignment (12th grade, so it was in Visual Basic, Pascal was 10th grade, C was 11th grade), you were free to choose whatever kind of program, so me and my old project buddy (we had some games planned, never finished a single one) as you might have guessed chose…
*drumrolls*
A text editor! I know right? Two guys who hoped to one day make a videogame did a text editor. We might have been dreamers but we weren’t stupid, a video game would have taken too many hours and be way too complex for the time we had. (we were proven right as ours was the only project that was finished at the delivery date)
It’s name was Paddyz0r. (Paddy as a diminutive of notepad and z0r because l33t tacticool mall ninja reasons)
It was very basic feature wise: opened and saved text files, could cut, copy and paste and could search text. We tried to make a “encrypt” feature but unfortunately we were too busy studying how to make no-cd cracks for games so we weren’t aware of the very basic — and for the intended use very functional — ROT18 and every way of “encrypting” it we came up with had glaring flaws.
I have — sadly — since lost the code (VB6) of the original project.
But I never let a project die…I always go and kick the dead body every now and then, so in the…eleven years since every now and then I update it.
Recoded it in VB.net in parallel with the VB6 version in 2004-2005.
VB.net version if I’m not wrong. (yes, I still have the exe)
Then changed to C# and redid it in C# in 2006 (thanks Microsoft for Visual Studio Express)
Then redid it in 2008 (VSE 2008)
Then redid it again in 2010 (VSE 2010)
Then…due to reasons I may cover in another post (although they are personal in nature, so I’m not sure) I haven’t redone it since.
Until two days ago!
Started SharpDevelop, new project and bam! (for some unknown reason I jump back and forth between VC#2010 and SharpDevelop constantly)
No, I lie, that was actually done earlier this year, two days ago I just opened the project, finished what was there to be finished and compiled it.
Paddyz0r lives!!! (and it’s all mine)
Then since I was in the mood, I started another project and called it Paddyz0r NG (Paddyz0r New Gen)
Which is even more feature basic I guess, but I really needed something that basic and couldn’t find it already done.
Richtext version of the old Paddyz0r.
I needed it as visually minimalist as possible, with only the basics, that allowed me to copy and paste into wordpress with the formatting intact AND (very important) autosave. (I found a program that was pretty close, but used Markdown, so no copy and paste)
It’s mostly for when I’m doing my half assed translations for another blog of mine since I like to translate at the same time I read the original and scrolling up and down on wordpress is too much work (honestly it fucks up my train of thought and I lose track of the paragraph I’m at).
So I decided to make my own.
Does the basic (open/save; cut, copy, paste; bold, italic, underline) and is as visually minimalist as I can tolerate.
And does fucking autosave, you can even configure the autosave interval, although the setting is reset on every start as I didn’t bother to save the settings anywhere.
So, my old pet project is alive again. And finished.
In two days.
If only all my projects could go this quickly.