Thread: Guide: Coding with PSPad

Hi All,

Decided I will do another quick guide for you, this one is about PSPad, a text editor with some very nice features.

Whilst I won't go over all the features (as I myself am still learning), the basics of the program are very helpful and make for very quick coding and publishing.

You can get the program from here: editor PSPad - freeware HTML editor, PHP editor, XHTML, JavaScript, ASP, Perl, C, HEX editor

Upon opening the program it looks a little complicated, don't let that put you off:



The bit that I want to focus on and make people aware of is the FTP part. In the below screenshot you will see I have clicked the FTP tab on the left hand side and then clicked on the connection symbol:



As you can see I have already created a number of connections for my own projects, if you clicked "New Connection" you will see a window that is common with stand alone FTP programs:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1309636/Tuto...p_settings.png (This is linked due to post limitations)

Fill in your details and click "Ok".

Thats it, now from the list select the connection you created and click "Connect", you will now be connected to your hosting space and able to browse around, exactly as you would with an FTP client.

Thats not all, oh no, if you find a file you want to edit, double click it and it will open up in the main window, you can then edit it and make any changes you wish to the file. After your edits if you pressed "CTRL-S" it would save it directly to the server for you, straight away, live for all to see, there are many other ways to save the file and if you look around the "File" section you will become quickly familiar with the available options (as well as the shortcuts above the main window)



Another great advantage is the panel on the right, it displays all the variables for the file you are editing, I find this is extremely handy when editing CSS files as you will see below. By finding the tag you want to edit and clicking on it the main window will automatically focus on the tag. No more scrolling through files or "CTRL-F"ing.



For my self, I still sometimes forget about the right hand bar, but its nice to have it available, and in my travels for looking for a quick and easy program to edit files directly on my hosting space I haven't come across a better one.

That right hand panel does look handy - should also help keep down overuse of classes. I assume you can have open two document windows at once, side by side, like Notepad++? (my current weapon of choice)

Im not sure to be honest, I would imagine you could do, it has lots of plugins and i havent fully delved into it.

Maybe this is what you are after?


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