notepad-plus-plus on S Anand

Software update

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 19:33:36 +0000

Time for the annual update on software I use. This time, I’ve got Wakoopa to help me with the relative usage as well. Here’s the top 100 software / web apps I’ve used recently, and how long I spent on them.

Gmail 186361 seconds
Notepad++ 130641 seconds
Google Chrome 79879 seconds
GitHub 43780 seconds
Windows Command Prompt 40967 seconds
Microsoft Excel 32578 seconds
Microsoft Word 27067 seconds
Microsoft PowerPoint 27059 seconds
Windows Explorer 20902 seconds
Google Docs 17989 seconds
Foxit Reader 17001 seconds
Microsoft Outlook 15855 seconds
Internet Explorer 15830 seconds
Google Search 15616 seconds
Skype 14423 seconds
Media Player Classic 14159 seconds
Google Groups 7061 seconds
Google Calendar 5531 seconds
Wesabe 2814 seconds
Google Analytics 2665 seconds
TeamViewer 1985 seconds
RGui 1875 seconds
LinkedIn 1528 seconds
YouTube 1400 seconds
Stack Overflow 1167 seconds
Acrobat Connect 964 seconds
Kongregate 914 seconds
HTML Help 871 seconds
PicPick 790 seconds
Zoundry Raven 684 seconds
Mockingbird 657 seconds
Twitter 655 seconds
iStockphoto 590 seconds
7-Zip 584 seconds
Buzznet 552 seconds
Inkscape 516 seconds
Bitbucket 499 seconds
Microsoft Visio 496 seconds
Paint.NET 474 seconds
IrfanView 461 seconds
Tableau Public 436 seconds
µTorrent 435 seconds
HandBrake 422 seconds
Check Point Endpoint Security 411 seconds
Windows Task Manager 385 seconds
Microsoft Project 372 seconds
IETester 347 seconds
Google Maps 340 seconds
eBay 310 seconds
Spokn 270 seconds
Firefox 269 seconds
Google Calendar Sync 259 seconds
Windows Calculator 247 seconds
PayPal 246 seconds
JsonView 220 seconds
Windows Live Writer 184 seconds
Junction Link Magic 152 seconds
WinDirStat 142 seconds
Kindle 139 seconds
XAMPP 127 seconds
Wakoopa 105 seconds
Dropbox 100 seconds
Office Help Viewer 99 seconds
PrimoPDF 94 seconds
PuTTY 84 seconds
Python 80 seconds
Flavors.me 75 seconds
Google Sites 71 seconds
Process Explorer 70 seconds
Windows Volume Control 63 seconds
Wikipedia 58 seconds
Nitro PDF Reader 57 seconds
Management Console 47 seconds
PythonWin 45 seconds
Windows Based Script Host 45 seconds
WinDiff 45 seconds
VLC Media Player 39 seconds
ClipX 35 seconds
Windows Installer 35 seconds
The Internet Movie Database 32 seconds
ImageShack 31 seconds
WordPad 25 seconds
TeraCopy 22 seconds
Skype Portable 22 seconds
Picasa Web Albums 20 seconds
Syncplicity 17 seconds
Google Reader 16 seconds
Google Talk 15 seconds
VirtualDub 12 seconds
Adobe Manager 10 seconds
FreeCall 10 seconds
Notepad 8 seconds
Codebase 5 seconds
eTrust ITM 5 seconds
Google Checkout 5 seconds
GDI++ Tray Notifier 5 seconds
ImgBurn 2 seconds
Virtual Desktop Manager 2 seconds
Tesseract201 2 seconds
TortoiseHg 0 seconds

Comments

Somnath 1 Mar 2011 4:38 pm: More time on Gmail than browsers - how are you accessing Gmail then?
S Anand 6 Mar 2011 8:51 pm: @Somnath, mostly breaking through proxies – see http://goo.gl/6wyg0 and http://goo.gl/DNtui. @Thej, no idea I’m afraid, but before I used Wakoopa, I was using https://gist.github.com/857652 which worked just fine, except that it wasn’t social and didn’t have the pretty charts. You might want to tweak that for Linux.
Thejesh GN 5 Mar 2011 5:29 pm: It doesnt run on Linux (only PC n MAC). Anything for me?
Shankar V 28 Feb 2011 3:10 am: hi Anand how do you generate this list? Wakoopa is blocked at Infy. So could not check that one out. Also, surprised to note that you are a Chrome user against FF. I have used both and my preference is still FF.
S Anand 28 Feb 2011 6:38 am: I work out of client sites – so sites aren’t blocked. Plus, it includes software from my home laptop. I shifted to Chrome a while ago, even for development, mostly because it’s faster than FF. The only thing I miss is Firebug, really.

Portable Apps

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:17:24 +0000

I’m totally hooked to portable apps now. You don’t need admin rights to install them. You can run them off a USB stick. They won’t make your machine slower. All the reasons not to install an application vanish.

PortableApps.com is a good starting point. For what it’s worth, here are my portable apps by category (most used on top).

Platforms

Firefox. If you’re using IE6, please die. Lack of admin access is no longer an excuse.
Cygwin brings you UNIX commands to Windows.
Portable Ubuntu run Ubuntu as a window in Windows.

Tiny utilities

GDI++ replaces the Windows font engine with a Mac-line rendering. Looks cool.
Clip is a command line tool that copies to clipboard. “dir | clip” copies the file listing to the clipboard. Outrageously useful.
PicPick takes screenshots of the screen, windows, regions, whatever. And you can edit them too.
uTorrent downloads torrents.
WinDiff compares two files and tells you the difference.
AlwaysOnTopMaker makes any window stay on top of other windows.
DiskTT tells you your hard disk (or USB stick) speed.
WinHTTrack downloads websites.
AllChars lets you type special characters like ½ by type Alt-1-2 or “ by Alt--. It’s shockingly intuitive.
Restoration lets you undelete permanently deleted files.
Windirstat tells you what’s taking up space on your disk.
Sysinternals is a bunch of system monitoring utilities.
Virtual CD-ROM mounts .ISO files. You can use .ISO files without burning them.
Autostitch stitches together photos to create panoramas.

Media

VLC plays any audio or video file.
TightVNC lets you log into other machines like a remote desktop./li>
Audacity lets you record and edit audio.
CamStudio lets you record video (screen capture).
VirtualDub lets you edit video.
MediaCoder converts audio and video from any format to another.
GIMP is like Photoshop. You can edit pictures.
Inkscape lets you edit vector graphics.

Servers

XAMPP installs Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl at one shot.
App Engine is Google’s freemium platform for app hosting.
Persevere is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Java.
Tomcat is a JSP server.
nginx is a fast web server
CouchDB is a RESTful JSON app server that runs on Erlang.

Development tools

Notepad++ is my current text editor. It has syntax highlighting, column editing, Unicode support, auto-completion, and is fast and free. So I dumped Crimson Editor.
Putty is SSH for Windows.
Tidy cleans up HTML files.
CSSTidy cleans up CSS files.
Processing is a graphical programming language.
Wireshark monitors network traffic.
Drip checks IE for leaks.
NVDA is a free screen reader.

Let me repeat:

You don’t need admin rights to install these.
You can run them off a USB stick.
They won’t make your machine slower.

There’s really no reason whatsoever not to have them on a USB stick at least. They’re cheap.

Comments

Naveen 19 Jan 2010 9:34 am: I have been using portableapps for more than an year now.Though the idea is to run it off a USB stick, this results in poor performance usually, especially for firefox.
Ganapathy 13 Feb 2010 5:47 pm: I landed in your site for analyzing IR songs. The collection of applications in www.pendriveapps.com seems to better than PortableApps.com (my personal opinion).

In search of a good editor

Thu, 29 May 2008 12:00:00 +0000

It's amazing how hard it is to get a good programming editor. I've played around with more editors/IDEs than I care to remember: e Notepad++ NoteTab SciTE Crimson Editor Komodo Eclipse Aptana ...

There are four features that are critical to me.

Syntax highlighting. Over time, I've found this to increase readability dramatically. Look at this piece of code with and without syntax highlighting:

Doesn't the structure of the document just jump out with syntax highlighting? Anyway, I've gotten used to that.
Column editing. I want to be able to do this:

Being able to type across rows is incredibly useful. I use it both for programming as well as to complement data-processing on Excel.
Unicode support. I often work with non-ASCII files, particularly in Tamil. Unicode support comes in handy when debugging pages for my songs site.
Auto-completion. This is 10 times more productive than having to look up the manual for each function.

(Oh, and it's got to be free too. Except for e Text Editor, all the others qualify.)

The problem is, none of the browsers that I've looked at support all of these features.

Editor	Syntax highlighting	Column editing	Unicode support	Auto-completion
e Text Editor	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Crimson Editor	Yes	Yes	No	No
Notepad++	Yes	No	Yes	No
NoteTab-Lite	No	No	No	No
SciTE	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
TextPad	Yes	No	Yes	No
UltraEdit	Yes	No	No	?
Aptana	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Eclipse	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Komodo	Yes	No	Yes	Yes

Wikipedia has a more in-depth comparison of text editors.

Actually, there's another parameter that's pretty important: responsiveness. When I type something, I want to see it on the screen. Right that millisecond. With some of the features added by these editors, there's so much bloat that it often takes up to one second between the keypress and the refresh. That's just not OK.

I've settled on Crimson Editor as my default editor these days, simply because it's quick and has column editing. (Column editing on e Text Editor is a bit harder to use.) When I am writing Unicode, I switch over to Notepad++. For large programs, I'm leaning towards Komodo right now, largely because Eclipse is bloated and Aptana was slow. (Komodo is slow too. Maybe I'll switch back.)

There's many other things on my "would love to have" features, like regular-expression search and replace, line sorting, code folding, brace matching, word wrapping, etc. Most of those, though, are either not too important, or most browsers already have them.

Well, there's the sad thing. I've been hunting for a good text editor for over 10 years now. May someone write a lightweight IDE with column editing.

Comments

Vinay 29 May 2008 12:00 pm: Anand:

This is in response to your blog post at http://s-anand.net/In_search_of_a_good_editor.html

For some reason, couldn’t post my comment through your web site.

Notepad 2 is my favorite. Though even that doesn’t have a “yes” in all four columns of your matrix. Auto-completion is missing and IMO for good reason (think responsiveness).

http://www.flos-freeware.ch/doc/notepad2-Unicode.html
Roland 16 Dec 2008 5:31 pm: On Windows boxes, I use UltraEdit32 exclusively. AFAIK, it doesn’t have autocompletion, but it loads and responds super-quickly, has column editing, syntax highlighting, and a gazillion other features that somehow don’t hog any resources. Sadly, there is no Mac version, so I’m forced to use the inferior TextWrangler.
Ben Karel 4 Apr 2009 2:54 am: How about jEdit and Vim?
Software for my new laptop 2 | s-anand.net 27 Sep 2011 7:16 pm (pingback): […] Editor: Didn’t have Unicode support a long time ago, so I […]