TextPad 5 is released

General questions about using TextPad

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bbadmin
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TextPad 5 is released

Post by bbadmin »

The first of a planned series of upgrades to TextPad this year has been released. TextPad 5.0 is available as a free upgrade to all TextPad 4.x customers. It has a redesigned user interface and compatibility with the 64-bit edition of Vista. Please note that Windows 9x, ME and NT4 are no longer supported.

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Release Notes

Enjoy!
Last edited by bbadmin on Tue Apr 03, 2007 10:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
ACRobin
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Post by ACRobin »

Wow - must try, but no support for 9x,me and NT4.

Nice to see movement. - good.
Sharbotcom
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And I guess I have egg on my face...

Post by Sharbotcom »

The new release looks good.
Jason Shallcross
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Is that it?

Post by Jason Shallcross »

Am I the only person that's disappointed with v5?

With all of those enhancement suggestions I was really excited when I heard a new version had finally been released after years of waiting.

But what we have seems to be very similar to version 4 with only a couple of minor toys like the file explorer thrown in.

What's more, all my macros have been deleted and all my syntax files have been overwritten.

Not happy!
gan

Post by gan »

@Jason

You forgot to mention all the new bugs in 5.0:)

As you can read from several posts here you are not the only one that is disappointed, but it seems like Helios chose to not answer any questions or give any more infomation which i think is one of the main problem.

I like textpad and got no problems with the lack of new releases for some years. I don't have a problem with the 5.0 release either and even if it contains few new features i don't care if it should have been version 4.8 that many people on this board stated. Also version 5.0 contain a lot of bugs. What i find a bit annoying though is that Helios don't respond to questions or give any information even if they clearly have a lot of users that bought their products which is far from happy.
jmb
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Post by jmb »

Vista 64 support and no Unicode compliance ?
Do you read the priority list in reverse order ?
I installed Textpad 5 (why not allow side to side install with 4.7?), and quickly went back to 4.7.
Maybe in another of your "planned release this year", I'll find a new interest in TextPad.
I used to consider it as a great product, and it is still my favorite editor, but it irritates me more and more when I get the 'ansi only' warning when opening a file.
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devdanke
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Glad for v5

Post by devdanke »

Hello Helios,

Thank you for resuming TextPad development. TextPad is my favorite text editor. I've tried scores of others, but TextPad remains the best one for me.

I'm happy to hear that v5.00 is the first of a series of releases. I can hardly wait for the new and improved features.

Some recent posts express frustration that TextPad's v5 new features are not the high priority ones many users wanted. I hope Helios realizes these people are upset because of how much they like using TextPad. But because TextPad lacks a few features they need, they can't use it as often as they'd like.

It would be great if Helios would post a roadmap of features planned for the v5 series of releases.

Once again, thanks for resuming TextPad development. It's a great text editor that is much appreciated by it's users.

Regards,
Dan
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Post by Cloink »

I get the impression Helios is a one-man band. My 4.7.3 version says copyright 2004, so that's about 2+1/2 years to release a new version which is basically Vista-compliant and little else, according to the release notes.

I just want to be able to configure my Tools properly, and I know I'm not the only one. It can't be that hard to either allow us to assign our own icon to a Tool button, or at least reconfigure the Tool-number so that my keyboard shortcuts marry with the numbers on the Tool buttons. When one's pc breaks and you have to install from scratch, and since I use TextPad on my home pc and my work pc, my head is geared in for having Tools associated with specific numbers, but it just isn't possible. I know I can reassign my keyboard shortcuts - that's why the numbers don't marry up any more. I'm thinking "ctrl-5" (as I have done for years, and I do at work), but looking at a Tool icon with "3" on it. And now I can't change it as far as I can tell, without uninstalling first.

Don't get me wrong, TextPad is the best editor going, but Helios's release history is beyond disappointing, and there are bugs they've not addressed as well. I bet the Find function still has the bug I reported a couple of years or more since. Can someone who's installed v5 let me know? Select 'match whole words' in the dialogue, find it. Close the dialogue, select some text that includes, say, a dot at the beginning, then do ctrl-F (NO dialogue box). It doesn't find it because internally it still has the 'whole words' selection checked - you have to bring up the dialogue box before it resets. Took me a while to work that one out and now I can't trust ctrl-f so I always have to bring up the dialogue box first.

And just how many people are going to be using Windows Vista anyway? Ol' Bill needs at least a couple of years before a new OS can be trusted. Don't suppose anyone saw 2DTV (a satirical cartoon program) on ITV in Britain a few years ago? Bill was showing his family round his fancy computerised house, everything crashed/broke and they were homeless. "Don't worry, I'm already working on 'House 2004' which will be better than 'House 2003'." Hm, loses a bit in the translation, but it was very funny. I suppose that's why I'm a computer programmer and not a comedian...
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Post by ak47wong »

Cloink wrote:I bet the Find function still has the bug I reported a couple of years or more since. Can someone who's installed v5 let me know? Select 'match whole words' in the dialogue, find it. Close the dialogue, select some text that includes, say, a dot at the beginning, then do ctrl-F (NO dialogue box). It doesn't find it because internally it still has the 'whole words' selection checked - you have to bring up the dialogue box before it resets.
I just checked. It's the same in v5.0.

Andrew
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Post by wnent »

First off, I use TextPad all the time and absolutely love it. When I saw version 5 was out, I was as excited as a five-year-old on Christmas. That ended when I saw the release notes.

I have to say, I'm surprised nothing changed about regular expressions in the new version. I was expecting the next release to incorporate all the regular expression features of WildEdit. It would be really great to be able to use non-greedy regular expressions.

All in all, the number and type of upgrades was disappointing, but I'm glad to see development has started again. I hope the next round of updates is worth getting excited about.

Thanks and have a good one,

Kevin
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Post by jumpfroggy »

Is there a way to subscribe to announcements? I didn't realize 5.0 had been released until I happened to visit textpad.com randomly.

Textpad has been the program that I've bought that's most worth the money spent. That being said, I'm looking for a replacement. Helios has not shown any sign that they're listening to users, and their silence has lost my trust. I need either a closed-source company that stands behind it's product, or an open source project with some activity.

I'll keep an eye out for further updates, but in my mind Textpad is all but dead. Even the promise of "planned updates" rings hollow to me... how many updates? What features are on the TODO list for the next versions? What kind of timeline are we on? We've been asking for *years* if any new version has been coming out, and then we get an incremental release with no explanation. Basically, we need more transparency to rebuild trust.

devdanke is right... "people are upset because of how much they like using TextPad". I still use it all the time, because it is the best out there. But unless things change, I'm going to migrate to something less polished but more active.

(sorry for the rant, that's 3 paragraphs of rant for 3 years of waiting. Sounds about right)
Jason Shallcross
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New Behaviours

Post by Jason Shallcross »

Does anyone like the way the find in files search results panel works in 5? I don't know if it's just because it's new, I've tried to get used to it for a month now, but I still want the old functionality back where the search results acted like a separate file that didn't cover up the file you're working on. Perhaps we could have a "classic" mode?

Lots of little annoyances like that have creeped in which I hope will be covered in the next update. For example, you can't toggle the clip library, Ctrl-F3 will only switch it on.

I'm trying to like it, but I really am considering going back to 4.7.
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