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I use Textpad 4 because in general it does everything I need and I have no desire to use a later version, especially after someone whose opinion I trust told me that I'd hate it.

Anyway, the one area where Textpad infuriates me is the spellcheck. I've made sure that there are no user dictionaries, although it appears I may have inadvertantly added some words to the original dictionaries. (is there anywhere to get fresh copies of them?)

What happens is that Textpad seems obsessed with adding apostrophes to the ends of words that have 's on them already. Conversely it usually refuses to auto-correct names after I've capitalized them and told it to auto-correct them.

For example, if I run a spellcheck on this;
It will flag jacko's as unknown. I type in Jacko's as the replacement and click the Auto-correct button. It changes jacko's to Jacko's' and keeps it selected. If I then click the Ignore All button, it will change all occurrences of jacko's to Jacko's'. WHY???

Why is it adding an extra apostrophe at the end? I didn't tell it to do that and jacko isn't in the dictionary/wordlist, so why it is adding something I never told it to add? More importantly, how do I stop this???

Conversely, if I run a spellcheck on this;
It will flag tilly as unknown. I type Tilly as a replacement and click Auto-correct, it only changes the first occurrence and stays on it until I click Ignore. Ignore All is greyed out. It will then flag every occurrence of that name. It auto-correct them to add the capital T, but it still makes me click Ignore on every one. Why isn't Ignore all available after I've told it to auto-correct a name???

It's an unknown word, I typed a replacement for it and told it to auto-correct them all, so why is it flagging every single one of them???

I use TextPad as an editor, not for spell-checking. Consider it a bonus, not fundamental. There is other software out there which does a way better job for spell-checking.

Also consider installing TextPad from scratch - either thru a separate environment (i.e. a VM) or on your desktop. I cannot imagine that even Helios itself is able or willing to re-install that old version - it isn't supported anymore either.

Maybe the spellchecker is correct after all - I encounter many people not being able to know proper English, especially with plurals and possessive cases... Don't you have a more complete example, like 3 sentences in a text?

AmigoJack wrote:I use TextPad as an editor, not for spell-checking. Consider it a bonus, not fundamental. There is other software out there which does a way better job for spell-checking.

I've used word processor software such as Open Office to spellcheck, but that often changes the file in way I don't want. One file I did that with came out with the blank lines deleted for some reason. Or it will change the EOFs such that when I view the file in other some other programs, all the lines are run together. I like that simple text editors such as Textpad don't make any changes to the file behind your back (generally).

AmigoJack wrote:Also consider installing TextPad from scratch - either thru a separate environment (i.e. a VM) or on your desktop. I cannot imagine that even Helios itself is able or willing to re-install that old version - it isn't supported anymore either.

The only reason I haven't done that yet is that Helios used a really stupid system for managing the macros. If you delete or move the macro files, Textpad will notice and set the number of macros to zero, wiping out the menu. However if you add macros to the macro directory, Textpad doesn't notice and doesn't add them in. How many macros exist to the program is controlled by a registry key.

Plus, rather than having descriptive names, all the macros have a filename with a number and as I recall, you can't just renumber them as that creates chaos. It's one of the reasons I haven't deleted a bunch of old macros that I don't use any more. It also has a bad habit of suggesting the number of the last macro when you go to save a new one, rather than adding one to it.

Then there's the face that you can't assign hotkeys to specific macros. You can assign hotkeys to set positions in the Macros menu, but if you delete a macro or the order gets changed, your hotkeys will invoke different macros, since they apply to the manu position rather than being attached to the macro itself.

The upshot of all this is that backing up the macros (some of which are quite complex and which I do NOT want to have to recreate from scratch) is a royal pain in the ass.

AmigoJack wrote:Maybe the spellchecker is correct after all - I encounter many people not being able to know proper English, especially with plurals and possessive cases... Don't you have a more complete example, like 3 sentences in a text?

Not at the moment. And I doubt that the spellchecker is correct. It adds an extra apostrophe to the end of "It's".

There's also the issue that it refuses to simply auto-correct words after it's flagged them and I capitalize them. It should make the same change to each occurrence, but instead it flags each and every one of them. If I abort the spellcheck and use search/replace to manually change them all, then I can tell it to ignore them all, but if I correct them as part of the spellcheck, it stops on every one of them.

Rekrul wrote:a really stupid system for managing the macros
...
can't assign hotkeys to specific macros

Try 8.1.x in a separate system, where you can definitly assign hotkeys per macro. And juggling with the files might not be an issue anymore, too. Years ago I also used 4.x for a long time and then jumped to 7.x. Going to 8.x outweighted potential disadvantages because Unicode support had become crucial for a longer time.

In overall I dislike macro support where you can't edit them (that would also help migrating them much more), but it's not a key thing for me either and still better than not having macros at all.