Textpad isn't dead! Confirmation from Helios

[Richard Thomas]

Hi All

I ended up emailing Helios to ask them if they were still developing TextPad, or whether 4.5 was the last version we'd see. Good news!

"TextPad is in a constant state of development, but I cannot divulge our
plans for the next major release, at this stage.


Kind regards,

Sandra Rawlinson
Helios Software Solutions"

Make of that what you will! )

Cheers

Richard

[Peter T]

Good news, the lack of updates certainly had me worried!

[Rich Day]

It's a pretty outstanding product as is. I cant really see there is much to add to it - although a HEX editor (for all file types) would be nice

Rich

[Berend Hasselman]

I agree with you. An excellent editor, that hardly ever fails me.
I always return to it.

How about

1. visual differences

2. compressed view with a jump ability
(LaTeX chapters/sections, Delphi procedure/function, C/C++ .......)
(Winedt has a wonderful Gather facility)

Might be possible with compressed view of marked lines

2. More functionality in clip libraries (coloring/separators)

4. User buttons on toolbar (nice for LaTeX and AMS special symbols)

5. Nicer word wrap: leave current layout alone but enter a hard newline when word
just typed exceeds right margin.

6. Some sort of simple scripting. Don't make it too complicated.

Berend

[Richard Thomas]

Yes, you're right, it is an excellent editor, and it depends what you use it for.

If you're planning on using it for code editing, Textpad's got a lot of rivals these days. For a start, have a look at the Eclipse project (www.eclipse.org) for an example of what's on the way (though not necessarily ready yet)!

At the moment, Eclipse only really edits Java files at the moment, but as it's open source, and designed to cope with any language, I'm sure it'll support PHP/Perl/C/C#/etc before too long!

As a lightweight, versatile text editor though, Textpad's unbeatable!

[Roy Beatty]

First on my TextPad wish list is for Helios's staff to "eat their own dog food," and thus to feel the absence of edittable macros and the other suggested functionality. I suspect that satisfying personal need drives most shareware development. That's the most likely way we'll see TextPad dog food with pull-top lids.

Second on my wish list is for Helios to have an extremely profitable year. So profitable that they can double their development staff. Without more resources applied to development, work on enhancements will be eclipsed by support for new environments. For example, a large portion of the changes in the last two releases addressed unicode or Windows XP. These changes to our application environments will continue. Fortunately Helios' is keeping pace, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

Aside from keeping up with change, there's another distraction from our fondly wished for improvements: look at the enhancements in version 4.5. Consider "New options to disallow use of the File Open command and to apply user capabilities restrictions to Administrators." Now, fellow readers, how many heartfelt pleas for this type of feature have we seen in this forum? Surely more of us in this forum *prefer* that policy conformance loopholes be left in place! So how did that request get done to the neglect of, say, edittable macros? Aside from being easier to implement ...

I speculate that Helios makes less money from the typical inhabitant of this forum than from those who pay for site licenses. For example, a system administrator for a university wants to support students by making available a good text editor. But the Admin doesn't want those clever, stir-crazy kids playing with the system environment through a registry trick. And they say so to Helios. Sysadmins also worry about having an audit uncovering use of unlicenced software. Such customers represent far more revenue than, for example, I do. I haven't paid Helios a sou since the last for-pay upgrade. So I haven't given them a reason to heed my requests. Nor have 95% of us.

So how can we double Helios' development staff and make our desires reality? Pay for your license if you haven't done so, or better, coax your employer or institution into buying a site licence for TextPad! I'm sure Helios, like any good Scotsman, would pay much more attention to you!

And, y'know, once you're administering a site licence, you'll suddenly be much more interested in system rights policy conformance ...

FWIW,

Roy Beatty

[Alex Angelopoulos]

I'll put profits for Helios as my Number 1 wish, thank you...

I'm still living on my single license, but the product gets used for support for *lots* of people - this happens with development work. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how to do anything to *help* Helios make more money from TextPad - although it has occurred to me to start requiring clients who expect me to work on-site to buy a license. They'll never use it themselves, but I'll have it everywhere I go.

Ditto on the macro stuff. Having played with TextPad extension a bit over the last few months, I can see why this is not a super easy job from their standpoint; they are definitely dependent on DDE and most of the directions in which they could extend functionality in a user-friendly way appear to me to require strategies which involve lots of development work resulting in a heavier product.

There are possibilities though, even with the current product; I've used the ability to trigger reload requests to do processing on files using simple WSH scripts from the Tools menu. Unfortunately, I am now at the point where I need submenus on the Tools menu!

[Chris]

I sent an email to Helios to know what are the plans for the future of TextPad and I got e-x-a-c-t-e-l-y the same answer than Richard Thomas.

It seems that Helios doesn't care about the customers and reply allways with the same generic email.

TextPad doesn't suits our needs anymore, it is going to be outdated. I'm afraid that my collegues and myself will look for another text editor...

[Richard Thomas]

You're right about Textpad not suiting users' needs any more, unless all they want is a standard text editor.

The problem is that the majority of developers these days expect/need more advanced features, the kind of features which until recently were the preserve of the expensive editors (ie VB's editor, plus Visual Slickedit and CodeWarrior), eg code completion, 'intellisense', build management, and so-on. These days they're all available in cheap/free editors such as Emacs, JCreator, Eclipse, and Netbeans.

I'm a Java developer myself, and while I started my Java career using Textpad, these days I spend the majority of my time in JCreator, Slickedit, Netbeans. Neither of these run as fast as Textpad does, but the net benefit with the extra tools such as code completion outweigh the slower responses.

---total speculation begins---
Textpad was never a 'real' company's project, it was more a couple of people's pet project, which happened to be better than the majority of non-pro text editors. Nowadays, the developers have better things to do with their lives, and Textpad has taken a back seat.
The requests for new features are more and more demanding on the developers' time and resources, and it's no-longer just a case of an evening job; it now demands full time development work, and Textpad's never sold enough copies at a high enough price to permit this.
A casualty of software piracy, paid-for-software in a very open-source area of computing?
---total speculation ends---

Pardon the pun, but Textpad's being eclipsed....

[Travis]

You know it strikes me as funny that we live in a world where free software is thriving. Yet I gladly bought enough licenses for my team of a quality text editor.

There are features in TextPad that I can't get bundled together anywhere else. I have seen that many people have asked for better Macro Support. I suggest that Helios take an example from other companies. I have seen LISP used in Emacs. I have seen Python used, Perl would also work well. It would not take as much effort to take an existing open source language and interpreter, and plug it in to TextPad.

I have my own list of features I would like to see added. But, hopefully the Helios people are paying attention to the competition. Take everything good and improve it. If that was done with what is already a part of TextPad, no one would want to choose another.

-Travis

[PeteH]

\"Macro programming language:
Embedded programming language for extensive customization
Modern-style syntax
Offers automatic start-up macro
Features procedures with parameter passing, local and global variables
Provides access to editor, screen, user-interface, system functions
Includes macro language debugger
30,000+ lines of macro source included
Accommodates macro files up to 64k in size, with up to 60 macro files
loaded in a session
Allows access to DLLs \"

The above quote was taken from a feature list at the following link for \"TSE Pro\"
http://www.semware.com/html/tsepro40fl.html
Should mention though, haven't bothered trying this software, on the face of it it's hideous, and bit pricey at $99

There's a great clamour in this forum for the editable macros feature, however we can only hope that when (or IF) v5.0 arrives, it is in there!

Love my TextPad though, just bought one today.

PeteH