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Class name: “PowerShell” or “PowerShell 5”.Open TextPad, click the Configure menu item and select “New Document Class”.Drop the PowerShell5.syn file under %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Helios\TextPad\8\.Note: Rather than being C/C++ based, this one works best with a PERL mapping, hence the “PERL=1” parameter at the top.Download my PowerShell v5 syntax file from here (because they’re slow to add new submissions from customers).Download the syntax files for languages you want to use from here.After installing TextPad, don’t launch it just yet. Here’s an example scenario for adding a language and support features for PowerShell v5 on Windows 10. And I’m a curmudgeon that barks “newer does *not* always mean *better*” hrmpff!! (and then I turn slowly and run away as fast as I can). Some others today are equal to it, but it had those features ten years ago. In my (humblest of humbled) opinion, TextPad has the easiest and “best” (subjective) snippet management features of any editor. In short, it’s very flexible and easy to customize. TextPad has offered many standard code editing features since it’s early days, and is now at version 8.x, with updates emerging several times a year (so far). Never mind all the syntax and snippet add-ons available for more “code” languages than “human” languages, they stand by that assertion. One reason for that, is that I was (at the time) bouncing frequently between a lot of different languages, and I found the need to standardize on one editor that was:īut here’s the rub: Helios (the developer) insists it’s not a “code editor” at all, but rather, a “text editor”.
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Today I typically use Visual Studio Code, PowerShell ISE, the PowerShell console, Notepad++, and Visual LISP IDE (VLIDE) when the need arises.īut one that I always seem to miss is TextPad. And I’m not counting the interesting graphical experiments like MIT App Inventor. I’ve forgotten more than I can recall, but some that come to mind include emacs, vi, pico, Aurora, EDLIN (ha ha! smack!), good old DOS EDIT (the crackbaby born from EDLIN in a dumpster behind a Walmart), Notepad++, Sublime, Eclipse, Komodo, PrimalScript, Wise Script Editor, ColdFusion, and dozens of app-embedded editors from AutoCAD/VLIDE, to Office VBA, to Visual Studio. Like many developers and script kiddies (God, I hated that term for so long, but have gotten over that finally), over the years, I’ve used a great many different code editors in the course of getting work done on time.
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