Okay, so I know how this is going to end: DonationCoder resident AutoHotkey wizards are going to demonstrate how instead of paying $49.95 for a piece of shareware, you can have all its features for free in under an hour. Tip of my hat to them! AHK saves me a lot of time every day, so this remark is not meant to be flippant. However, if - like me - you happen to be a sucker for beautiful interfaces and convenient configuration screens, check out Actual Window Manager.

AWM seems to have received only a handful of mentions at DC so far, yet it falls in the one of the most discussed categories: the programs that arrange, move, resize and do all sort of neat tricks with windows. Actual Window Manager may well be the most feature-packed of all, and its capabilities extend beyond managing windows: it also supports virtual desktops and multiple monitors with replicated taskbars, Start menus and a dual Alt+Tab app switcher.

The following was inspired by the recent DC thread Windows editors - do they have to be so bad?, and by the new (to me) HippoEdit text editor, which is surprisingly inventive for an editor this young. Rather then reviewing a single application here, I thought of pinpointing the features I find best in the several text editors I use daily. Then I though of listing some of the worst features as well, so this thread should be properly called The Best (And The Worst) Of (Some) Windows Text Editors (With Screenshots), For Your Entertainment.

I've only listed some of the stand-out features - those that are unique to an editor, are particularly impressive or useful, or those I cannot live without. I did not list features that are too common to mention these days (word wrap, auto indent), unless a specific implementation of a common feature seemed particularly inspired (or particularly not so).

I should also note that there is a lot I don't do with text editors. I almost never use them to write executable code. I never use persistent blocks or any implementation of text clips (I use AHK for text expansion and configuring the same set of clips separately in each editor sounds too much like work). Apart from writing short notes to self, I use text editors to search, replace, tweak or extract text and tags, often in xml files, from small to quite large (tens of megabytes). I thus pay much attention to speed and efficiency of editing large files and to the display capabilities that help visualize and navigate the thicket of tags and entities. I use regular expressions heavily and love incremental search. Finally, correct handling of Unicode is a must in my line of work, so editors that do well there score points with me (and TextPad, which does not, serves mostly as a scratchpad).

Since it's a long post, I might as well reveal right away that the moral of the story is nothing groundbreaking - there is no optimal editor, even given my limited range of uses. I have registered copies of all the editors listed here, and use them all interchangeably, since none does it all. Of course the other moral of the story is that all authors of the editors mentioned herewith should bow before this post daily and start implementing the missing best-of features posthaste, to one-up the competition. Or better still, five-up them.

After more than eighteen weeks of private beta testing and eight months since previous version, Total Commander 7.50 public beta 1 is finally available.

Official announcement: http://www.ghisler.c...iewtopic.php?t=21820

The newest version brings out almost 600 fixes (mostly related to new functionality) and many new features. In this mini-review I will try to focus on the biggest changes only because I want to avoid copy&paste of help file. I recommend to take a look on Help or HISTORY.TXT files (some additions will be listed at the end of my post though).

Cropper is a screen-capture application written in C# that leverages the image processing functions from the System.Drawing and System.Drawing.Drawing2D namespaces of the .NET Framework.  It was written by Brian Scott as a programming exercise in C#, but has gained a fair degree of popularity through a succession of versions.  It is particularly well-suited to taking a series of captures of the same size. 

One of the things I loved about Vista was the desktop gadgets, especially the photo frame one.  I really missed it when working on Windows XP, and so was very happy to find myPhotoFrame on Bits Du Jour.  myPhotoFrame is a very small application that does one thing, and does it well in a small memory footprint- displaying photos in an overlay on the desktop.  The frame can be changed, and the size of the window and photo scaled, along with mouse over transparency changes to allow you to see your desktop through the window.

Who is this app designed for:
In this digital age with small cubicle sizes, sometimes it's not feasible to have photos plastered around your workspace.  myPhotoFrame can display a folder of family photos on your desktop discretely to always keep those memories with you.

SharePod is an application to allow you to circumvent the use of iCrap (iTunes, for those of you still attached to the demon that have yet to realize it). I utilized this, along with the temporary assistance of SongBird, to prepare my iPod and skip iTunes altogether.