TextFX 64-bit binary / source code unavailability?
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At first I thought the replies along the lines of “Just use regexes” were some sort of joke. It’s a little sad that guy038 actually typed all that out thinking he was being helpful. If you cannot perceive a difference in ease of use between pressing a button and using one’s acquired technical knowledge to write code that replicates that same button’s inner design, I don’t even know what to tell you - except that you might want to look up the phrase “opportunity cost”.
The concept of just scrapping a plugin because all users “ought to” learn search parsing language to do it themselves is a duck-brained monkey-man idea, evincing an unfamiliarity with very simple challenges during collaboration between humans. Imagine I want to have a temp or a teenager reformat things, and I want it to take one minute instead of sixty.
Imagine I’m a new user wanting to test drive Notepad++ with a specific use case, only to find that as a matter of fact that was removed and will never be re-implemented. Now years and years of documentation and reasons for people to start using Notepad++ are transformed into actively harmful and obfuscating misinformation claiming that the program has features it doesn’t and never will.
Imagine I want to “line up text in columns separated by clipboard character”, but I don’t know the regular expression for it. Whoops - Looks like instead of the one second it would have taken, the guy looking for the answer to that question has been waiting for 18 hours, as of this post. In that time he might’ve done it by hand. It’s piteous that people on the official notepad++ community would be seriously suggesting he do it by hand, then.
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@Bodacious-Crumb I’m unclear on what you mean by “scrapping a plugin.” Do you mean by the user or its developer? The TextFX plugin is 3rd party and was abandoned by its developer many, many years ago. Unless that fact changes or it’s forked by someone else later on, one may have to accept that it may never work on notepad++ 64-bit and it could potentially stop working in future versions of notepad++ 32-bit. So if you mean “by the developer” then understand that these are open source projects and no one’s obligated to either provide these plugins or to maintain them. And if you mean by the “end-user”, well, if this abandoned plugin stops working entirely, then the solutions provided here today may be the only stop-gap ones available until something better comes along.
Furthermore, guy038’s regexs are useful for people who A). must use notepad++ 64bit for some reason, or B). want to easily implement these features and want a potentially simple copy paste solution. In either case, his posts are helpful to some people, but not necessarily everyone.
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@Bodacious-Crumb, I agree with you. People who don’t understand this, may use vim+grep+regex. Why do you need Notepad?
And Notepad++ without TextFX is useless for me. MS Word is a good deal. -
After reading through this thread - I wonder if there could one day be a configurable plugin/menu where we can add/save these kind of regex functions for use like in the TextFX plugin which was convenient not having to store/remember all these regexes…
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as a workaround you could make macros out of it and store it with a meaningful name.
Cheers
Claudia -
add/save these kind of regex functions for use like in the TextFX plugin…?
So I’m confused. In version 0.26 of TextFX, loading/saving seems to be there…but when you click the buttons you find out it is not really:
Is this what you are talking about? Does it work for you? If not, what do you mean by what you said in your post?
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Sorry guy038, i also use regex quite often in my work but i’m not a true expert them and i prefer NOT to be…
To put it simply, a solution for a feature suddenly went missing from a tool cannot be learning a language by all of its users…But i recognize that these days this is the standard solution…the user must solve the problem on its own (so it is not considered and treated as a user anymore, but just as another developer…but a software like this is not made for developers only and one should not be able to understand it in order to use it).
I feel that we are more and more going backwards with softwares in general…
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So let me see if I understand… Someone authors some software (Notepad++) and give it to you for free. Someone else authors a plugin (TextFX) for such software and gives it to you for free. Then, one of the authors (the plugin) decides to no longer maintain their product (for whatever reason). Someone else, (Guy) in discussing this, provides some helpful hints/solutions, also very much free.
And you want to, what, complain about these things? I suggest you choose a commercial text editor (which you will pay for) so that you can get really good support/maintenance, or hire some (paid) experts to solve your problems because you are “not a true expert and … prefer NOT to be”.
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The world is grey. If you think it is black and white then you are colour blind.
Most users will probably not be able to use regex. Some like me can but don’t have the time because we have something else we consider more useful to do, like drinking coffee.
The reason why we visit forums like this is we hope someone else has taken the trouble to put the whole clockwork machinery, gears and levers behind a button. We are looking for a click-whirrrrrr-pop solution. Like inserting a coin in a machine and getting a drink instead of having to go through the pain of smiling at a shop-keeper.
So guys if I may ask, who the #@!$ has a click-whirrrrrr-pop replacement for TextFX? If you want to talk about spanners you better have ones that can fix my head.
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@Jupiter-Punungwe said:
If you want to talk about spanners you better have ones that can fix my head.
I’m not sure these spanners even exist…
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Sometimes there is a pre-made solution. Sometimes there’s not. You’ve only had one post here, and your account is only recent, so it’s impossible for us to know how often you’ve looked at this forum, to see who the regulars are. But, so that you know, most of the people who have given workaround answers in this Topic have been contributors for a year or more, and have very good familiarity with Notepad++, and have a good idea of what it can and cannot do, whether natively or through plugins. If you see a thread like this, where someone has asked whether such-and-such a feature exists, and multiple people give answers that show more-technical workarounds, rather than just pointing someone to a whiz-bang plugin that does it out of the box, it generally means that no one on the forum has run across a whiz-bang plugin that meets the needs.
(Also, an unsolicited secret of interpersonal communication that I have learned over the years: In my experience, when people volunteer their time and knowledge to help others in a user-community-forum like this, cursing at them – whether literally or through Q*bert-ese – is generally not helpful: it doesn’t suddenly “jog their memory”, it’s not a magic password that suddenly unlocks secret information that they would have otherwise hidden from you, and it doesn’t usually encourage people to continue to be willing to help. In fact, it pretty much does the exact opposite. Do what you will with this tidbit of information.)
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I did a search for “date” in this topic and didn’t see anyone mention Date: Insert Long/Short Format. TextFX is the only thing I’ve known that contained that function. Is there another plugin (or built-in feature) that allows you to easily insert a full date/time stamp into the current editing window? Am I missing something obvious? Is there a reason why TextFX was never released for the 64-bit version of Notepad++? Thanks!
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I did a search for “date” in this topic
Did you search the whole Community for “date”? Of course, Community search is known to be poor…
Regarding “another plugin”: You can script yourself a date solution that can put the date in any format you can imagine; these might get you started with that:
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/13792/date-time-again
https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/16147/date-and-time
https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/5537Is there a reason why TextFX was never released for the 64-bit version of Notepad++?
There is an experimental version out there somewhere, and by that I mean something not by the original author, or with permission of same. As to a reason, well, people’s interests change over time. I’d guess the author lost interest or moved on to a different text editor. It happens.
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@amarand said:
Is there another plugin (or built-in feature) that allows you to easily insert a full date/time stamp into the current editing window?
You could use the NppCalc plugin for that (installable with both PluginManager (Npp up to v7.5.9) and PluginsAdmin (Npp v7.6 and above)). Activate the plugin and type e.g.
FormatDateTime( 'dddd, dd.MM.yyyy hh:mm:ss', now() )+ENTER. The plugin inserts the according date/time infos (ddddis the name of the weekday in your locale) into the following document line.It’s not the same like that what the TextFX plugin does since the command you typed gets not overwritten but NppCalc is more flexible and has a bunch of other useful functions.
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@dinkumoil said:
You could use the NppCalc plugin for that
…okay…but is there a way to bind to a keycombo with that plugin? Typing that horrendously long thing is even worse than simply typing the time. What am I missing here?
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So the general solution here seems to be:
The 64-bit version of Notepad++ is pretty much useless for a lot of us (including myself.) Having a text editor be in 64-bit doesn’t help me much, there are no really killer new features that have been added, and I can emulate a 32-bit program pretty easily on my system.
I’m not sure why anybody uses the 64-bit version, honestly. Just download and install the old 32-bit version - I’m on 7.5.9 myself, and it works fine.
I would be interested to hear if someone has some compelling argument for why 64-bit 7.6.6 is superior to 32-bit 7.5.9. I can’t see one.
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@Alan-Kilborn said:
is there a way to bind to a keycombo with that plugin?
You can record a macro while typing the formula (including the terminating
ENTERkey) and assign this macro to a keyboard shortcut afterwards. -
i’ve just seen that nppcalc is apparently also not available for x64, and can not serve as a date workaround replacement for textfx on npp x64.
is this correct ? -
You are right, I’ve completely missed the fact that the question of @amarand was about a x64 plugin. Sorry for that confusion.
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@dinkumoil said:
You can record a macro while typing the formula (including the terminating ENTER key) and assign this macro to a keyboard shortcut afterwards.
Ah…but then wouldn’t the original text of the “formula” stay as well? The whole NppCalc thing seems clunky, while in spirit it has some good ideas IMO…
nppcalc is apparently also not available for x64,
Yes, apparently another limiting factor.
I’m still thinking that Pythonscript, if people want to go to the trouble of installing it, offers the best and certainly the most customizable (as to time/date format) solution.
