New Testing Release Incoming...

18 Aug 2009

Guess what?! I haven’t been idly waiting for the stable release to go gold. Instead I got my head down and spent a lot of hours fixing up the Unicode conversion of Programmer’s Notepad. Long overdue, PN 2.1 will be full-unicode but there’s more than just that. Here’s the list of features in the build I’m currently dogfooding:

1. Full Unicode Support

2. Support for Translation - PN in your language

3. Multiple concurrent selections, and block typing

4. Virtual space

Full Unicode Support

This support extends right the way throughout Programmer’s Notepad, meaning you can now have projects containing complex-script filenames, search for and find Japanese text in your document, and insert Chinese text from your text clips. I’m sure there will be a few bugs in the unicode support, but they’ll be much easier to fix now this work is done.

Translation

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and finally found the time and inspiration (plus the prerequisite Unicode support). Version 2.1 supports translations built into fast, small, Windows-standard resources - no runtime string remapping. Translations, however, are performed using the industry and open-source standard PO file format meaning lots of good tools for maintaining the translations. Each translation is then transformed into a Windows-standard resource DLL by black magic, or something like that anyway - I’ll detail this further later.

Want to get your translation in for 2.1? Get started translating PN.

Multiple Selections, Block Typing, Virtual Space

I’ll probably write some more about this at a later stage, but fantastic upstream changes in Scintilla are coming to you in PN 2.1. You can now Ctrl-Click to set multiple insertion points, or Ctrl-Drag to create multiple selections. With multiple insertion points you can type and the same text will be inserted at each point. Virtual Space has been requested so many times I’ve lost count, and finally this release brings it to you.

Screenshot Anyone? These claims would be worthless without a released build or proof right, so here’s your screenshot:

[caption id=”attachment_358” align=”alignnone” width=”500” caption=”Programmer's Notepad 2.1 Psuedo Localised Build”][/caption]

This build is running with a pseudo-localised language meaning that I can check where strings still need localising. You’ll see there are a bunch still to do, but progress is being made. You can also see a three-line insertion point where I’ve just typed a sentence once and had it appear in three places (this never gets old). Finally the projects window is showing a project containing a Japanese filename - I have no idea what that file is called, but I do know I can save and load the project and file, and can find that text in that file. For those of you who regularly work with non-English text this is huge.

I just have to add the UI to enable language switches and store the configuration, and I’ll release a new testing build - watch this space.