Bits du Jour has an offer on the UltraEdit Bundle of UltraEdit, UltraCompare, and UltraSentry for 31 August 2009. Deal price $49.95, list price $139.95, you save 65%.

UltraEdit is mouser's favourite editor and came top in the DC Best Text Editor review (though the review is getting out of date).  As well as the editor, the bundle includes UltraCompare that lets you instantly review the differences between up to three files or folders, and support file merging and FTP.  Finally, UltraSentry is an application that deletes data to United States Department of Defense standards, making files and folders unrecoverable, and offers secure disk sanitation, registry cleaning, and advanced browser security.

Please can anyone recommend a macro program with a "learn by example" feature, that can be run no-install from a USB stick?

The obvious answer is AutoHotKey (AHK), but I've had hit-or-miss results with its AutoScriptWriter, and to get anywhere with AHK, you really need to start editing scripts.  What I'm thinking of is the sort of job where you need to repeat an action 20 or 30 times or more, but may never have to do that job again.  In those circumstances, the effort put into script writing might be greater than doing the job manually (if more interesting to do).  A macro recorder would make it quicker and more painless.

I contacted Insight Software Solutions, authors of Macro Express, and they say they're working on a portable version, but can't give a release date (sounds like pressure of too many other things).

WinMacro by Senthil Kumar is a simple freeware macro recorder/player, but may be a bit too simple.  No editing of any kind, for instance.

TIA...

XY 8.20 released

XYplorer 8.20 has been released on 12-Aug-2009. Here's a quick introduction to the main new features:

• Large Toolbar Icons. Now you can toggle small or large toolbar icons.
• Sticky Selection. A safe and comfortable multiple selection style for huge file lists.
  
  Sticky Selection, also known as "Checkbox Mode" is a selection style known from many apps with multiple selection lists. The effect is pretty much identical to holding the CTRL key while you click on an item or hit the space key on the focused item: The previous selections are not touched and the current item's selection state toggles. Also clicking on the white space will not unselect the selected items.
  
  Sticky Selection is obviously very practical when you work on long lists and want to pick out particular items manually: You won't easily lose your work by the slip of a finger.
  
  Last not least there's a toolbar button for quick toggling

Links:

• XYplorer Home Page
• XY 8.20 Update Page
• XYplorer Download Page

Back when we thought the invention of the QWK offline message reading format was the pinnacle of technology.

-Innuendo (August 09, 2009, 10:31 AM)

Back then... it WAS!   

The Bat is awesome in 90% of everything, but it's editor has issues also, and they never get fixed.

-superboyac (August 06, 2009, 03:37 PM)

I asked if they could make TB! start any editor of your choice, i.e., present the message you were working on as a file for your preferred text editor to work on.  That's the way many systems worked back in the Fidonet DOS days.  For example, I used GoldED (one of the few... the proud... the REGISTERED), and GoldED had both a rudimentary editor of its own, and the ability to use whatever text editor you wanted.  Same with the Terminate terminal/point system/fax/mini-BBS etc. program, which even had many popular editors already set up in its configuration file.

For example, the Bat still can't wrap lines like a normal editor.

I do like the way you can press Alt-L and have it tidy up the shark's-teeth formatting, but it should be more automatic.

Too late to the party.  Most of the time I too use Total Commander.  But I occasionally use Oscar's File Renamer, which works a bit like using a simple notepad, with simple learn-by-example macros.  Here's part of Mark Wieczorek's My Favorite Smallware review of it:

It's extremely simple interface lets you search & replace or record keystroke macro's. What really sets this apart is that it opens a directory like a text file, moving the cursor up and down doesn't just select a different file, it keeps the same character spacing as before, and you don't commit your changes until you're happy with them so you can experiment without fear of screwing up.

I received a reply from Foxit:

We deleted and banned many spam messages and users every day. We might have mis-deleted your account. We have recovered {your account}

I've tried it, the account is indeed active, though they didn't undelete my posts.  I feel they were trigger-happy on anti-spam measures, but at least they've done the right thing by reinstating the account.  Now to see if it stays that way...

Still interested in alternative editors, but Foxit would do themselves a favour by adding a Help file.  There's nothing at all at present, and I'm probably overlooking some of the functionality.

@Grorgy:  From the sales puff, gDoc Fusion looks like a competitor to Nuance PDF Converter Pro.  I have Able2Extract, which has much of the same features apart from any kind of editing.  Did you by any chance look at gDoc Fusion's editing features?

@basc:

I think now what you're suggesting sounds a bit like the "User Tools" setup in some editors, except you want it with smart handling of the command-line switches?  Sounds like a lot of hard work to make the smart handling universal enough.  Sleeping Wolf's idea of quietly scanning the switches is interesting, but there could be problems as some switches are mutually exclusive.

@Contro: PowerPro is a great program - but I agree you wouldn't really run it just for the dialog extender features.    It only really makes sense if you intend to use several of its features.

I realise I didn't expand on why I find Total Commander useful.  TC has built-in "macros," which you can attach to a button on its button bar.  I added two buttons, one for UNC path+filename, one for short path+filename.  You put the cursor on a file, press the appropriate button, and TC sends that information to the clipboard.  Then you can paste it into a dialog.  XYplorer has a similar feature, bound to a hotkey instead of a button.

@superboyac: In your review, you say there's a free version of Direct Folders.  It looks to me like it's only free for personal use.  95% of my computing is done at work...   

I'm not really sure what you're asking.  But, have you looked at mouser's Drag and Drop Shell Robot?

Drag and Drop Shell Robot  is a utility to help power users easily peform operations on large numbers of files and folders.

You can create any number of configuration files by specifying a target application and various commandline parameters or options. To use the program, you simply select a configuration file and drag & drop files and folders onto the queue window, and click Start. Then sit back while the operation proceeds through your files. You can also export commands to a batch file instead of immediate operation.

tomos beat me to recommending the DC review 

As I use Total Commander as my file manager, rather than Windows Explorer, I don't have quite so much need, but you still can't avoid folder dialogs.  I run PowerPro and find its "Favorite folders lists for file open/save dialogs" feature very useful.

Anyway, I think I might have finally found something, its called MemPad.
http://www.portablefreeware.com/index.php?id=889#comments
[...]
Cons:
2. ) Export is limited to just .txt output. (Though it doesnt look too bad, and I can "work" with it easily enough.)
3. ) Export to .html tree, .csv, or a folder structure with text files in them for nodes.

-orange386 (July 26, 2009, 06:05 PM)

Send the author an e-mail and ask him if he'll send you a copy of his Qhtml utility:

Qhtml receives MemPad's export, and produces a HTML page, taking care of the following jobs:

• use a HTML template where the exported text will be embedded
• handle line breaks and paragraphs
• pass HTML tags, which are required in square brackets
• handle some special tags like current date and titles

4. ) Making a link to a file requires me to replace all spaces in the file name with underscores. (Though this is minor because I can mass rename this through XYplorer easily.)

I think that's a limitation of Windows, which allows you to include spaces in file paths, and then won't honour them    Happens to me at work when trying to e-mail links to UNC files on the network.

4. ) An "insert file link option" instead of having to write links into the node by hand.

Not sure what you mean by that, but, you use XYplorer.  I've assigned Ctrl-U in XYplorer so that if the cursor is on a file, the UNC path+filename are sent to the clipboard, so you can instantly paste them into MemPad or whatever editor.  Go to Tools -> Customize Keyboard Shortcuts (Shift-F9 brings this up directly) -> Item UNC Path/Name(s), and assign your chosen hotkey.

1. ) Multiple notebooks support with a tab bar.

F7 instantly toggles between current and last-used notebooks, but you probably mean all notebooks (or a chosen set) on a tab bar.