This is just a little rant about text editors/word processors.
Which is kinda strange as most of my writing/note taking is done with pen and paper, but as of late I’ve been doing pen and paper in parallel with digital. (took me long enough; honestly I simply dislike the idea, that’s why I haven’t adopted it for the last 17 years)
But much like with stationery, I have a bit of a thing for text editors and word processors.
So, let’s start this useless rant.
(950 words of nothing incoming)
Textmaker 2012 (Softmaker Office Standard 2012)
The old, was my go to word processor for a couple of years; when the free version of SoftOffice (FreeOffice) came out I stopped using it.
Almost forgot I had it and completely forgot the features it had, especially one I really wanted a few days ago and didn’t have (I’ll tie this up on the part about PolyEdit Lite).
Perfect for me, lightweight — some 50MBytes of RAM for my usual stuff —, snappy start (literally five or six seconds).
Overall great for the price.
PolyEdit Lite
The older (with the latest version being from 2010). Although it has only recently crossed my path.
Less features than TextMaker 2012, that’s for sure, but ever so slightly faster. (cold start of a second or two and that’s loading two documents on startup)
It’s a lean, mean tool for a quick write of random ideas. With the added bonus of having text formatting options, unlike say, notepad or any other plain text editor (that also tend to be extremely fast), but I needed a bit more options and LibreOffice Writer is a beast when it comes to resources.
Came across it because I ended up having to switch between a couple of documents (rtf) a lot of times. Hence the extra clicks to go to Window->*clicking the doc I wanted* were getting boring and causing undue wear and tear on the mouse buttons. (hey, I like to use strange stuff as justification, it’s technically true, just weird)
So that was my problem. The solution? Tabs.
And so that’s how I found it: “word processor with tabs”. (see, that’s the feature I forgot Textmaker 2012 had, I opened the 2016 FreeOffice version and saw no tabs and no options for it, so decided the old 2012 version didn’t have those either. Came to find out that they are a feature in Softmaker Office but not in the FreeOffice version. Found that out because I accidentally opened two documents on Textmaker 2012 and the tabs appeared)
Loved it, a lot.
Enough to actually try the beta of PolyEdit 6, which unfortunately was only for people with a registration key.
No problem, I still remember a thing or two from when I was younger and made no-cd cracks for a couple of games. (and a fix for GTA: San Andreas that changed the frame limiting from 30fps to whatever, never released it to the public, I guessed it was so basic that someone else had made one)
Seeing the program hasn’t had a new version since 2010, since it is a paid software, I guessed it was dead. (probably both the project and whoever programmed it)
Ah, the old feeling of opening a debugger to play around a bit; getting re-acquainted with the plethora of executable packers and random protections.
Damn, I’m really rusty (well, over ten years later it’s normal that I forgot almost everything). The thing was only packed with UPX and it took me a while to realise that.
After jumping that knowledge hurdle it was just a matter of unpacking, throwing a couple of NOPs here and there and it doesn’t annoy me about a registration key any more.
Success. (yes, I was actually kinda proud.)
(I did think about doing the same for PolyEdit 5.4 but the protection was way better, and the Lite version did everything I needed)
SublimeText
The new.
Is undoubtedly a name that always pops-up when you talk about text editors/code editors.
I was a Notepad++ guy for…a bunch of years. Until for a certain reason I dropped the program.
Then I moved to Programmer’s Notepad, that has some annoying bugs, but since I barely do anything relating with code with it…
For all the (little) programming I did I always used the editor of whatever IDE I was using.
For my day to day use SublimeText was too much of an hassle.
That was until…RenPy (as ashamed as I may be of admitting it, it’s the only engine where I have finished a project — oh, yes…there are rants about it coming — and I liked it, darn teenage years spent playing japanese visual novels, I now enjoy the format way more than I should as a balding adult guy), the editors included with it are decent but seriously lack some nice features.
Enter SublimeText and this really nifty add-on for it (many thanks to the guy who did the add-on).
So…yeah, SublimeText, really nice, been using it for a while with RenPy. Quite lightweight, which surprised me considering people always talked about all the features it had and nowadays features equal an excessive amount of bloat.
(which makes me use japanese made software when possible, their software system requirements stopped in 99, that makes for ugly but extremely efficient software; kinda kidding, there is still some efficient software made outside of Japan, heck, this entire rant has been about three pieces of it)
For coding SublimeText IS a great efficient tool. Bit of a salty price tag though, so I do as everyone else and use it unregistered.
And I guess that’s the end of the rant. Quite a good rant (for me, writing is cathartic, reader enjoyment doesn’t even cross my mind)