Posted 9 years ago
by RafaelLVX
Hi again.
After having braved and enjoyed Code Writer for a few months, I decided for now to switch back to Notepad++ for a more consistent and predictable behavior. I saw great potential here, so before leaving I'd like to leave my last report of bugs and ideas for improvement, in case they might be useful.
Bear in mind I'm always on Windows 10 x64.
Performance and power-using
- The app lags noticeably on all my machines, that's unexpected for a notepad.
- Many times the app takes several minutes to open, and I noticed sometimes it never really opened (long after I gave up it was still on the red screen, the menu in the upper left could be opened but no other function worked).
- First few keystrokes after opening file are always slow to display, wasting a few seconds and confusing user. It gets stabler after a while.
- Opening 3kb text files takes a few seconds, there's even a loading screen. Good-looking loading screen, but it takes longer than expected in my opinion.
- Changing between opened files takes a half-second too long too.
- After right-clicking, app bars show up. If I have several files opened and not yet saved, they are indicated by a red dot. Selecting one of them and Ctrl+S does nothing... I need to select, close app bars, Ctrl+S, then reopen app bar, select next file, close again... this takes longer than expected.
- Navigation on the upper app bar is slow. There are arrows to the sides when there are several files opened, clicking on them takes forever to move the files. Why not making each click slide right to the next file instead of moving pixel by pixel?
Webdev support and quirks
- As I have mentioned in the past, the app is geared towars several desktop programming languages and leaves web languages (html, php, javascript, css) hanging with incomplete support, which is unfortunate because Code Writer in its simplicity could be the best of its league in web languages but can't offer what advanced desktop programming IDEs offer.
- Still on web languages, I think the least to become very useful would be on-screen suggestions for html (tags and attributes), php (standard functions and parameters) and css (selectors and properties).
- Beginning and end tags and curly braces could be highlighted when cursor is on them. For example, when cursor is on <div>, it could highlight both <div> and </div>, also with a line running between them to make it easier to spot (straight line to the left of the line numbers perhaps?)
- There's a bit of auto-complete here and there, but not so great. For example it turns <br> into <br/> and <img> to <img/>, which aren't recommended in any scenario. For HTML4.01 and 5 the right tag is <br>, and for XHTML it has always been suggested the use of <br /> (with an empty space to avoid compatibility problems with older browsers). Using <br/> was a common mistake, but of course that's in the past now since we're back to just using <br> and not <br />.
- When creating a new HTML file it lacks the doctype declaration, which nowadays is very basic. Details... details...
- Ctrl+D duplicates content of a line, but if word-wrapping is on and a long line breaks, it will only duplicate the content of the text where cursor is, not the entire line (this can be very dangerous and makes the shortcut useless for those who use word-wrapping). Also it should be possible to mark a whole block of several lines to duplicate at once.
More
- Of course, bugs I reported in the last few months were not solved so far (or at least version number hasn't changed here):
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http://www.actiprosoftware.com/community/thread/23191/saving-new-files-cant-be-right
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http://www.actiprosoftware.com/community/thread/23192/depending-on-the-charms-bar-on-windows-10-can
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http://www.actiprosoftware.com/community/thread/23190/encoding-cant-be-right
Thanks for developing, wish you the best of luck with the best looking notepad yet created.
The latest build of this product (v4.2.42) was released 4 years ago,
which was after this thread was created.