TextPad Clip Library Updates

Some of you may be aware that I post my custom TextPad Clip Libraries, as well as Syntax Definition files, up on my downloads site.  I've had a few people e-mail me about a nagging issue where they download the files, drop them into the "%ProgramFiles%\TextPad 5\Samples" folder, but do not see the version number change in the Clip Libraries side bar heading (click the "_ About (x.x)" clip item.

The reason for this is that the Clip Libraries are copied into the folder path "%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Helios\TextPad\5.0", so that comply with Microsoft's Windows 7 compatibility guidelines (makes the files manageable by non-administrator users).

A quick way to update the Clip Library file is to right-click on the the name, on the drop-down button at the top of the Clip Library panel, and select "Edit book".

This will open the .TCL (TextPad Clip Library) file in the main editor panel.  Then you can open the updated version, select all (CTRL+A), and copy (CTRL+C), and then select all in the destination copy and paste over it (CTRL+V) before saving the changes (CTRL+S). To see the updated results, simply select a different Clip Library and then select the updated one again (toggle away from it temporarily).  That will force it to reload from the updated copy.

Cool TextPad 5 trick: Google Search with Firefox

I was poking around the TextPad forums again, home of my favorite code editor, and ran across a tip on setting up a custom tool for executing a Google phrase search from within TextPad which launches IE. I played around and got it working with Firefox 3 (RC) and it works great.

The steps are:

1. Click on the "Configure" menu
2. Click "Preferences"
3. Click on "Tools" in the feature tree. Then click the "Add" button and select "Program"
4. Browse to select "firefox.exe" (usually under C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox)
5. Click "Apply" then click twice on the new "Firefox" entry (slowly) to enter Rename mode
6. Rename the tool to something like "Firefox Google"
7. In the feature tree, under Tools, select the new tool entry to display the details in the main panel.
8. Replace the "parameters" entry with "http://www.google.com/search?q=$SEL"
9. Save and close the Configuration dialog form.
10. Now you can highlight text in the editor and run a direct Google search on it with Firefox.

You can also make a toolbar button to this tool to make it even quicker to access.