The are many development environments available for programming but
recomend not using them for writing code. In many cases, like
Visual C++
code is added to projects by the development environment confusing
the new programmer. In the case of
Visual Basic
all of the code for the main structure of a program is
created for the programmer and hidden. If you really want to
understand the code and how it works, create all programs from
scratch with a text editor. Some examples of programming source
code that can be edited with a text editor:
Java, C and C++
HTML, JavaScript and VBScript
Assembler, SPIM and ABEL
Windows batch files and Unix shell scripts
SQL and many, many more
Beyond programming, it is possible to open almost any file as text.
For example, if you are using Windows and MSOffice try opening
a Word document in Notepad. There are several
ways of doing this:
Open Notepad, go to File, Open..., change
"Files of type:" to "All Files", browse to a word doc
and select and open it.
Drag at Word doc file icon to the Notepad icon
Right-click the Word doc file icon and select
Open with..., chose Notepad.
Once open you will notice many lines of odd characters, like:
Scroll down further and you will start to see the actual text
of the Word document. You also may see a directory name
of where the file is stored, the names of fonts used in the file,
the name of the person who wrote the file, and other information.
The strange characters and the other information tell your system
what kind of file it is and how to display it. Much of this information
can also be seen by right clicking on the file icon and clicking
Properties. Modifying any of the information in the file
through the text viewer can corrupt the file. Try this
with other types of files like .JPG or .GIF to see the
differences.
FrontPage and other web publish software add a lot of
junk to your HTML files that you do not need and
may have trouble understanding. To create a new
HTML file in Windows do either of the following:
Right-click a blank space(like on the Desktop) and
select New..., Text file. The icon will
appear ready to be renamed. Call it whatever you want, but
be sure to replace the .TXT with .HTML.
OR
Open Notepad, enter
your HTML code and be sure to save it
as an *.HTML file by adding the extension to the file name
and change the "Save as type:" to "All Files"
You may use the above to create almost any type of file
by substituting .TXT with .CPP, .JAVA, .SQL, etc...
To grab the text source of a web page, in the browser
go to File, Save as... and select
"Web Page, HTML only" from the "Save as type:", not
"Web Page, complete." "Web Page, complete" will create
a folder with all the images on the web page and save
them to your disk.
If you just want the text of a web page(not the HTML
source code), save it as "Text Only"
Convert documents from one platform to another
If you have to move a file(say WordPerfect or Word) to some
other system that does not have that program, go to File
and save it as "Text only" being sure to use .TXT as the file
extension. You text-only document is now portable.
Strip-out unwanted formatting
Have a document with stupid fonts, colors and
crazy indentations? Just want the text? Choose
Select all from the Edit menu then
copy it to Notepad, the
formatting is gone(you may still have strange
line breaks and spacing).
Standard with Windows and has some great features in later releases.
Go To... In the Edit menu "Go To..." opens a dialog box
displaying the current line number. Enter any line number and click
"Ok" to move the cursor to that line. This is very useful when you get
a an error message that directs you to a specific line.
Find/Replace There are two options in Edit menu, "Find..." and
"Replace...". Find will locate a text string or character. Replace will find a text
string or character and repalce it with a designated string or character. For
example, suppose you have a file with "Joe Brown" on many lines nad want to change
them all to "Mr. Brown." Put "Joe Brown" in the "Find what" field and "Mr. Brown" in
the "Replace with" field.
I believe these are only available with version 5.0 or greater.
