October 1997
s m u g
compulsion
by leslie harpold

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The Price is Right

When I first started writing this column I made a tacit vow to stay away from things technological. There are plenty of places on the Net where you can read about overpriced software, hardware, groupware, shareware, and tupperware. Well, just this month kids, there's one more. I'm sure glad the vow was tacit.

I use Notepad a lot for HTML coding. It's likely the least glamorous thing I do that doesn't involve Murphy's Oil Soap, and I previously used the most spartan app going, Notepad. Then, and don't ask me how I found it, because I can't remember, I discovered Super NoteTab.

It's light on RAM use, so it doesn't interfere with the behemoth that is Photoshop, which is constantly open, or the RAM sucking capability of two browsers and two copies of Eudora. (I take the multi-tasking thing pretty seriously.) Unlike Notepad it has the ability to display proportionally spaced fonts, which is nice, since most of those fixed width things are an eyesore and don't look good at small sizes, which is how I like them. With Super NoteTab, I can make the fonts as tiny as I like, and I can choose what font I want to display. Now, as an aside, if you register the program, for a whole $5, you get spell check, but you lose the ability to have proportional fonts. So, needless to say, I go without the spell checker. The other thing the $5 gets you is live and clickable URLs, which, truthfully, I can do without. Even the freeware has a "preview in browser feature" which comes in very handy.

Basically, what I like about it is control. It's everything I miss about Notepad. Not to mention things I didn't know I was missing. Great little functions like "text statistics" that give you not just a count of the words I've managed to hack out thus far, but also how many times each word was used, and how many different words appear in the document. By the time I typed that last period I had employed 196 different words of 321 total. See? It's fun. One click and I can capitalize all the highlighted text, or convert it to lower case or have each word capitalized. Super NoteTab features search & replace, which is pretty much the whole reason to love it unto itself.

Optional free add-ins are clickbooks that have HTML tags, which I take advantage of. You can customize them, so if there's something you type over and over, you just add it in, and you can drop in whole lines of text or code with a double click. You can add or delete tags at will, so naturally the first thing I did was dump the "blink" tag and a few other antiquated ones and throw in my own special favorites. It got to be fun. There are clickbooks available with those damn smiley things too, but frankly, I'm way too proud to stoop that low.

I love it so much that every time I use it, it actually occurs to me how much I love it, and I've been using it for over 4 months. Usually it only takes me about 30 days before I started taking my software for granted and treating it with the respect accorded a drunken prom date.

So, Windows people, I know you're out there. Go fetch this fine piece of software and you'll know what I mean. Don't forget to send Eric Fookes, Super NotePad's creator, some fan mail as I did. As a favor to me though, tell him you want spell check and proportionally spaced fonts in the same version. Then I'll finally have some perfect software.

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leslie@smug.com

in the junk drawer:

September 1997
August 1997
July 1997
June 1997
May 1997
April 1997
March 1997
February 1997

featurecar
net
worth
chair
bumping
uglies
gun
smoking
jacket
barcode
ear
candy
pie
feed
hollywood
lock
target
audience
scissors
three
dollar
bill
dice
compulsionvise
posedowncheese
the
biswick
files
toothbrush
mystery
date
wheelbarrow
and such
and such
hat
blabfan
kissing
booth
martini









     
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