Long ago I gave up using Notepad for editing plain text. Pete showed me the wonderful tool TextPad which I've used ever since for non-heavy editing. It's fast, it's easy to add colour highlighting, it's just a great tool. Today makes me happy about it because I just found another very useful feature.
I've been going through apache server logs to trace the path of users. The log files have all the ip addresses mixed throughout in chronological order. However I want to look for one person (ip address) and see their path through that. I was using grep among other things to "process" the logs. However that's not needed if you just want to sort! If you hit F9 it comes up with a dialog where you can give prams to sort by (for us it was IP address then date). Zip! It was done. Very fast. Ahh... I love it when the tools I love give me more reason to like them. :-D
Textpad is great. If you really want to see it shine, pick up the XMLTidy Add-on (http://www.textpad.com/add-ons/) for formatting XMLstreams in the editor.
ReplyDeleteIt's perfect if you (like me) prefer working directly with the code as opposed to a fancy-shmansy GUI (ala XML-spy).
Textpad also works great for extracting debug info from log files (ie, do a find-in-files search on your log file and it'll spit out a listing of all occurences, this works particularly well if you're doing *ahem* performance tweaking and listing your output times on the same line. :) )