EditPad Pro 8 Migration Guide

EditPad Pro 8 is a major upgrade from version 7, with a ton of new features and improvements. Some features have been moved around or redesigned. This migration guide explains the most important changes.

When you install EditPad Pro 8, it does not replace EditPad Pro 7 or prior. It installs itself side by side. Any shortcut icons or file associations that pointed to EditPad Pro 7 will continue to point to EditPad Pro 7. EditPad Pro 8 will not automatically take over your settings from version 7.

If you don’t mind spending some time to configure EditPad Pro 8, I recommend you simply go over all the options in Options|Preferences and Options|Configure File Types and set them as you like them. If you’re in a hurry, use Options|Export Preferences in EditPad Pro 5, 6, or 7 and then Options|Import Preferences in EditPad Pro 8 to transfer your preferences and file types. After configuring the file types in version 8, you can make it take over your file associations by clicking the “always open” and “always edit” buttons in Options|Configure File Types.

If you recorded Macros in version 6 or 7 that you want to keep, use Macros|Organize Macros|Export All in EditPad Pro 6 or 7. Then use Macros|Organize Macros in EditPad Pro 8. If you have favorites in the File, Search, and/or Project menus, you can export and import those in the same way as macros. You can open the Organize Favorites dialog by directly clicking the Favorites menu item.

The Block|Prefix, Block|Suffix, and Block|Fill menu items have been removed. They are no longer needed. EditPad Pro 8 now supports direct column editing. To prefix or suffix an existing rectangular selection, first use the new Block|Persistent Selections menu item if needed to make selections persistent. Put the cursor on the left-hand edge of the selection to prefix it or on the right-hand edge to suffix it. Then enter the text you want to insert on each line. Alternatively, you can make a rectangular selection that is zero columns wide. Then type the text you want to insert on each line. This works regardless of whether selections are persistent. To fill an existing rectangular selection with new text, first make sure that selections are not persistent. Then enter the text you want to replace the selected columns with on each line. Alternatively, if selections are persistent, you can first use Edit|Delete to delete the selection. This leaves a zero-column selection. Then you can enter the text you want to insert in place of the columns you just deleted.

User Interface Changes in Version 7

The user interface in EditPad Pro 8 is pretty much the same as that in EditPad Pro 7. If you are upgrading from EditPad Pro 6 to EditPad Pro 8, then you’ll need to contend with the changes made between EditPad Pro 6 and 7 described below.

The Options|Configure Toolbars and Menus item was removed in EditPad Pro 7. To configure the toolbars and context menus, right-click on any toolbar and select Customize. Now you can even customize or disable the main menu. See the Customizing Toolbars and Menus topic in the help file for more information. To configure keyboard shortcuts, go to Options|Preferences|Keyboard.

In EditPad Pro 7 you can use the search toolbar without using the full search panel with its multi-line edit boxes. This saves screen space when doing simple searches and is the default mode. If you want EditPad Pro 7 to behave in the same way as EditPad Pro 6 (meaning to only use the full search panel and hide the search toolbar when the search panel is closed), you need to take two steps. First, make sure the full search panel is not visible. The Search|Multi-Line Search Panel menu item should not have a checkbox. If it does, select Search|Multi-Line Search Panel to remove the checkbox and hide the search panel. Second, make sure the search toolbar is not visible. Right-click on any toolbar. The Search item in that list should not have a checkbox. If it does, click the Search item in the toolbar context menu to hide the Search toolbar. Now the search panel and search toolbar are invisible, as they are in EditPad Pro 6 when it first starts. If you now press Ctrl+F or use Search|Prepare to Search, EditPad Pro 7 will open the full search panel like EditPad Pro 6 does. If you then press Esc to close the search panel, both the search panel and the search toolbar will be hidden like EditPad Pro 6 does. Do not reassign the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut if you want to get the EditPad Pro 6 behavior. Ctrl+F must be assigned to Search|Prepare to Search if you want Ctrl+F to work in EditPad Pro 7 the way it did in EditPad Pro 6.

The Options|Preferences|Colors tab page was removed. You can now select a color palette for each file type in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax.

In Options|Preferences|Cursors you can still configure overall cursor movement behavior. But you can no longer configure the display style of the cursor there. To change the looks of the cursor, go to Options|Configure File Types|Editor Options and click the Edit button next to the text layout drop-down list. In the text layout configuration window, you can configure the cursor for each text layout. Select a predefined cursor from the drop-down list or click the Configure button to open the text cursor configuration window. The reason the cursor looks are now part of the text layout configuration is that complex scripts and right-to-left scripts have different cursor needs than pure left-to-right scripts. By default, EditPad Pro 7 uses the same vertical bar as EditPad Pro 6 for left-to-right text layouts. But it uses a cursor with a “flag” indicating text direction for complex script editing to make it easy to work with bidirectional text.

By default, pressing Ctrl+Tab now jumps between tabs in the most recently used order. Pressing and releasing Ctrl+Tab will switch between the two most recently used files. To go further back, hold down Ctrl while pressing and releasing Tab more than once. This is similar to the way Alt+Tab switches between applications in Windows. In EditPad Pro 6, Ctrl+Tab activated the next tab to the right, and Ctrl+Shift tab activated the next tab to the left. To restore this behavior, turn off “use most recent order when switching tabs with Ctrl+Tab” in Options|Preferences|Tabs.

EditPad Pro 6 allowed you to configure a single date and time format in the Preferences. This preference setting was removed in EditPad Pro 7. Instead, the Insert Date and Time item in the Edit menu now has a submenu. Select Other Date and Time Format in this submenu to specify the date and time format that you want to use. The submenu will remember the last 16 formats that you used. Clicking the Insert Date and Time item in the Edit menu directly will insert the date and time format that you last used.

EditPad Pro 6 allowed you configure in the preferences how the View|New Editor command positions both the original and the new instance of EditPad Pro. This preference setting was removed in EditPad Pro 7. Instead, the View|New Editor command now has a submenu where you can select how both editors should be positioned. Clicking an item in the submenu will immediately start the new instance. Clicking View|New Editor directly will start the new editor using the most recently used positioning option. Also new in version 7 is that if you close the new EditPad instance and you did not move or resize the EditPad instance that launched the new instance, then the original instance will take up its original size and position again.

The email address for technical support and feedback still works. But if you have purchased EditPad Pro 7 and your PC has internet access, we prefer that you ask support and send feedback via the new user forum. It’s built right into EditPad Pro 7 itself. There’s nothing to configure (except your proxy server, if it needs a password) and no login to remember. Your EditPad Pro 7 license automatically grants you access. To connect to the forum, simply select the Forum item in the Help menu.