Messages

1

Best E-mail Client / Re: Pegasus Mail?

« on: October 16, 2006, 07:42 PM »

backup... backup... backup...
If a file is too big to comfortably fit on backup media then it needs to be split up into manageable chunks.  Personally, I wouldn't want more than a couple of redundant backups of my years old mail anyhow.
If Murphy had a computer he would have added a law, "If you don't back it up you will lose it, at the worst possible moment".

* rand1038 been there, done that

I've tried Pegasus mail (I have an account set up on it).  I love the spam filter (can see what it is setup to do very easily and it works very well) and the user interface.  I like a utility to be more functional than pretty and I think Pegasus fits the bill.  I personally had no problem with setup and when I went to the Advanced Options and wondered about the impact of the Winsock setting I easily found the answer in Help > Contents > Options and Preferences Overview > Advanced settings.
I'm trying out the latest version, if it keeps working this well I'll switch over to it.

2

Living Room / Re: Vista licensing - will it kill enthusiasts interest ?

« on: October 16, 2006, 05:43 PM »

Nice. Microsoft really doesn't like their customers, do they?

-JavaJones (October 16, 2006, 03:28 PM)

M$ doesn't have to like their customers when they have a corner on the market. It is convenient for people to install windows because software is readily available for the OS.  When it becomes less convenient to run a windows OS due to restrictions, or alternative software becomes easier to acquire and use, M$ will take a kick right in the market share.
Open Office is a pretty good alternative to M$ Office and does a nice job of viewing .doc files. Wine is starting to work pretty well. *nix distros, in particular the 'cheap' (as in $40-$50) supported systems, are getting easier to install and configure.
Finally, cross platform development libraries like Qt and wxWidgets make cross platform development a snap. Java is also an option of course but I'm speaking in terms of native executables. I think anyone coding nontrivial programs that do not perform platform specific tasks should be using one of these libs, or something similar.
Ok, so I went off on a bit of a tangent  My point is, M$ doesn't necessarily have the corner on the market anymore and if they make some stupid moves (this Vista licensing schema could one of them) they may, eventually, become the old dog on the block instead of the big one.

3

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« on: October 10, 2006, 11:53 PM »

WinMerge has no problem, though it does take a couple minutes to do the compare, which is no surprise.

-rand1038 (October 09, 2006, 03:26 PM)

Here's Keith Devens on Differencing Programs

WinMerge is decent, but go with pretty much any of the others instead of it.

-rjbull (October 10, 2006, 04:51 PM)

I'd have to disagree with him on that.  I wonder if he has ever needed to diff very large files?  In my opinion WinDiff is slow and outdated (Modified: Monday, August 18, 2003, the file from Keith Devens site);  even diffing small files and dirs I found it to be clunky.
CompareIt does a nice job! (but ... its 30 bucks)

Thanks for the link to the diff utils critique rjbull, a couple there I hadn't tried yet.

welcome, rand1038. nice avatar.

-nudone (October 09, 2006, 03:34 PM)

Thanks nudone

I'm gonna lurk for awhile, I'll probably be asking about getting in on some devel eventually.  School is intense right now.

4

Unfinished Requests / Re: IDEA: Text Editor just for text (stay with me)

« on: October 09, 2006, 03:26 PM »

This thread has been brought back to life once, might as well hit it with the defibrillator again 

Hello everyone.  Nice site!
Excuse my long winded post, I've been dealing allot with text editors lately and this looked like a good place to pontificate.

On my journey to write a completely freeware registry editor that is stable and has more features than regedit (think regedit combined with registry crawler and an undo feature) I have started out by writing a utility to export a registry file in ASCII format.  In that pursuit I have been examining regedit exports (45 MB files on my XP machine) and comparing them with my utilities' exports.
I use WinMerge for the file comparisons. I tried to feed windiff a couple of 45 meg files and it crashed or locked every time.  WinMerge has no problem, though it does take a couple minutes to do the compare, which is no surprise.
Along the way I've also found the need for a text editor that can handle these huge files quickly so I can examine one, fix my app and recompile, examine another one and so on.

The following numbers are not benchmarks by any means, I did the timing with the second hand on my wristwatch.
Opening up a 45 meg, 800,023 lines, .reg file  with notepad takes my 1.8 GHz, 768 MB DDR machine 3.5 minutes.
editor2 (I have explorer2 pro) takes 15 seconds to show the first part of the file and has it completely loaded in 30 seconds.
My favorite text mode code editor Context took 4 seconds to have the file completely loaded. As far as an all around editor goes, it fits the bill nicely, though it is designed for coders.  If your looking for any type of text formatting this is not the editor for you.  You can choose one font and thats it, no bold, italic, etc.
On the other hand, some of my favorite features are (from the authors page):

• unlimited open files (tabbed - rand1038)
• unlimited editing file size, 4KB line length
• Unicode UTF8 support
• code templates (boilerplate text for you writers out there - rand1038)
• customizable help files for each file type
• file explorer with favorites list (and filter by type - rand1038)
• file compare
• export to HTML/RTF (color formatted text, great for posting code - rand1038)
• editing position remembering across files (and shutdown/restarts - rand1038)
• normal and columnar text selection
• bookmarks
• search and replace with regular expressions
• search and replace text in all open files
• customizable syntax highlighting colors, cursor shapes, right margin, gutter, line spacing...
• miminize to system tray

... and a 4400 KB working set on my machine, with no doc loaded.
Anyhow, I couldn't let this thread pass without plugging my favorite text editor
Hopefully some of you will find it as useful as I do.

Rand