Warne's World: NoteTab

I'd like to take the opportunity to push for a family of text editors that I've come across. The family, called NoteTab, has 3 members for 32-bit Windows; one is freeware and two are shareware. From a large options menu each family member can be customized to if not all then at least most of your editing needs. In addition to being able to smoothly handle simple and complex editing jobs (a must for any serious text editor), the NoteTab editors can also deal with complicated file management operations, multiple and sequential program launching, and they can calculate. The latest version 4.82 (May 12, 2000) allows the user to write even more flexible "clips" with a simple syntax such that, for instance, the editor is able to control copy/paste operations in other applications that support such clipboard actions. Still, the NoteTab editors have so far primarily been advertised for editing HTML documents. Another task they accomplish with flying colors.

Now if you're primarily interested in writing HTML documents, why on earth should you care about text based editors when there's the wonderful world of WYSIWYG (visual design) such as Microsoft FrontPage 98? Well, if you're going to construct your own web site, I think it's important to first learn some basic HTML and CSS syntax. You use HTML to set up the structure of an HTML document and CSS for its style. Ya OK, I admit: I think it's important to separate structure from style...

The advanced visual design tools (Microsoft FrontPage Express and Netscape Composer, the free HTML editors delivered with IE 4/5 and Communicator 4.x, do not belong to this group since they don't help you with CSS) can certainly take care of most things for you (I think you can even order pizza with some of them), but it's a lot of money to pay for just making your own personal web site. Moreover, if you don't know what's going on "under the hood", it can be difficult to keep a consistent look and feel to your site. In my view, the main advantage with the WYSIWYG editors is web site management for the corporate internet and intranet sites. As such they are very useful to the professional webmaster, but for ordinary netizens they're a waste of time, effort, and money. Not to mention that you'll never get to experience the sheer joy of learning how to create a web page!

The Editors

The NoteTab editors are excellent substitutes for any other editor you may be using on your Windows 9x/NT4/2000 system. NoteTab Light is the freeware version of NoteTab Standard (Std), while the top of the line member is called NoteTab Pro. Two years ago, NoteTab Pro won the prestigious PC Magazine Shareware Awards in the applications category, and the Shareware Industry Award Foundations People's Choice Awards. Last year, NoteTab Pro won both the Shareware Industry Awards in the Best Web Enhancement or Utility category and the People's Choice Awards. This year, NoteTab Light won the Shareware Industry Awards in the Best Application category. You can download the trial versions

The Light version is freeware, but it can also be turned into the trial version of NoteTab Std. You may opt to download the programs from either the U.S. (http://www.notetab.com) or the Swiss (http://www.notetab.ch) NoteTab web site. The download links above are the same as the ones you'll find on the notetab.com page.

Features

Unlike MS-Notepad that comes with Windows, NoteTab lets you edit documents of virtually any size. Furthermore, you can open as many documents as your system's memory will allow, each with its own tab in the tab bar.

NoteTab is not your typical text editor and is currently unrivaled by the range of useful features it offers. You can for example open links in your default browser, calculate mathematical expressions, create outline-type documents, convert text files to web pages, strip tags from HTML documents, send documents as email, capture text copied to the Clipboard, view detailed text statistics, etc.

One of the most original features which NoteTab was the first to introduce is the "Editor Clipbook". This is a flexible tool for handling text clips, which can be anything from a single character to a large "boilerplate" chunk of text. Clips are stored in libraries with a header for identification, and retrieved by selecting the appropriate header from the list or by typing the first matching characters of the header into your document and hitting a function key. You can also store such clips on customizable toolbars, called clipbars (see the image above with the HTML clipbar).

By default, pasting a clipbook item will overwrite any selected text in your document. But by customizing your clip text with simple code you can do anything from wrapping the clip around a selection (great with HTML tags), to launching other programs, to loading files, to sending the document as email, to calculating the result of functions with multiple variables, etc.

Starting with version 4.5, the Clipbook is programmable and supports features such as variables, functions, commands, conditional statements, etc.! Furthermore, commands also provide seemless support for Perl and Gawk interpreters; scripts can be stored in clips and applied directly to highlighted text or a whole document.

Of course, NoteTab also offers the features you expect to find in a good text editor such as Find/Replace in all open documents or disk files, read and write files in DOS/UNIX/Mac format, sort/join/split/indent lines, change character case and text alignment, convert between ASCII and ANSI, spell checker, thesaurus, automatic indentation, etc.

NoteTab is very customizable. You have a selection of more than 80 commands for the toolbar and the main shortcut menu. The editor's behavior can be fine tuned to suit your needs thanks to many options. NoteTab can even substitute Notepad by simply selecting a menu command.

The commercial versions are very reasonably priced; NoteTab Std costs $9.95 (USD) while NoteTab Pro costs $19.95 (USD). The main features of NoteTab are:

NoteTab Gold

There's really only one feature I miss and would like to see in a future version of NoteTab: to be able to customize the coloring of tags. Now, NoteTab Pro lets you do this with clip commands (in CLB files only) and with HTML tags (in HTML documents only), but not with tags based on other characters than <...>. For instance, JavaScript functions have


                            function fooBar(var) {


                            if (var==0) {


                            do a;


                            } else {


                            do b;

tags, VBScript subroutines have Sub fooBar ... End Sub tags, LaTeX documents have \begin{foobar}...\end{foobar}, {...}, and [...] tags, and so on. Being able to custom color such tags at several levels makes it so much easier to read and edit complex code. From what I've heard, customizable syntax highlighting is planned for the upcoming NoteTab Gold (version 5).

Contents

NoteTab

The Editors

Features

NoteTab Gold