MY FAVOURITE THINGS

Dick Pountain/10:30/28 December 1995/IDEALOG 17

An illness in the family recently required my absence from home (where I normally work) for whole weeks at a time, and so I finally had to grapple with laptop technology. I'd dabbled with the brutes in the past, but never tried to do a whole week's work on one, completely deprived of access to the desktop machine that is my 'virtual office'. The experience was successful in that I managed to edit a whole issue of PC Pro's Real World section from a tiny back-bedroom in Manchester, but it was not without its problems.

The biggest headache was that the laptop I borrowed lacked a CD-ROM drive, which made me realise that it's now almost impossible to install modern software without one. I needed to take MS Word with me, but merely Laplinking it across from the desktop produced a brain-dead installation because a zillion necessary DLLs didn't get transferred with it. I solved that problem the thermonuclear way, by copying every single DLL from one Windows directory to the other, which luckily worked but could easily have caused still more problems by overwriting newer with older versions. (I believe there are Uninstall utilities that manage DLLs for you nowadays, but I didn't have one to hand.)

Even this thermonuclear approach was not enough for Borland's Delphi though. On my desktop I run Delphi from the D: drive, but the laptop only had a C: drive, and Delphi stubbornly refused to recognise its component library even after I'd edited every path and every INI file I could find. Time to re-install, but that required a CD-ROM drive and time was running out. When I have more time I'll try using East Coast Software's 'software network' Lap2Desk and see if I can re-install Delphi from a remote CD-ROM drive.

The nicest part of the whole affair was discovering what software I can no longer live without - the laptop had a 400 Mbyte hard drive with Windows 95 pre-installed, so I couldn't just bung everything across, only my favourite applications.

The first program to go on was Blackwell Scientific's Idealist. For several years now I've stored all my names and addresses (1373 of them as I write) in Idealist, as well as notes for articles and other assorted information. It's the only database program - apart from AskSAM - that I've ever been able to stomach, a free-form text database which has the best search facilities I've ever encountered since it was originally designed for bibliographers. Idealist even has Soundex searches so that I can just type "alan" and find Alan, Allen or Alun. It also has the best import facilities around, which allow you to parse foreign file formats on-the-fly by using regular expressions. 

Next to go on was version 1.3 of my current favourite text editor, TextPad from Helios Software Solutions. This is a plain ASCII editor (creative writing in Word still feels like swimming in treacle to me) but one with extraordinary power, and it's shareware and just £20 to register. Like Word, Textpad offers direct drag-and-drop of text blocks; it has full regular expression searches and also supports replacement expressions so you can manipulate the bits of words you match. Its best feature though is the hypertext file search facility. For example recently I was researching an article on VLIW processors for 'another magazine' and I wound up with 20 or more files of material downloaded from various online services and web sites. Ask TextPad to search for the text 'VLIW' throughout all these files; it opens a separate window showing every line that contains the target word; click on any such line and it opens that file in a separate window, with the cursor at the right place; paste that paragraph into my current document; voila.  

Third animal into the Ark was Ameol. I know, I know, in previous columns I've blathered about how I don't need an offline reader, but a year working on PC Pro has meant using CIX more heavily than ever before, and anyone who uses CIX would be crazy not to use Ameol. It's a remarkably professional piece of software - shareware again - that just manages everything for me, and keeps all my mail filed (previously I'd put it into Idealist) in a civilised fashion. I now use a second offline reader, for BIX, called Galahad which has some neat features (like you can attach a .BMP mugshot and .WAV sound-bite to your mail messages) but it's neither as pretty nor as solidly dependable as Ameol.

Fourth was PaintShop Pro v3.11 which has replaced all the other graphics viewers I've had, and I even use it for lightweight graphics editing. Graphics work for me means drawing simple block diagrams to illustrate articles, and for this job, believe it or not, I still prefer the primitive MS Paintbrush that comes with Windows (not the new 95 version though); it lets me move stuff around more easily than fancier drawing programs, and I can always use something fancier later to add effects.

Fifth was my tiny file of Windows Recorder macros for transposing characters and words, which I can no longer work without. When I press Alt-LeftArrow the character under cursor gets swapped to the left, and vice versa. Similarly Shift-Alt-LeftArrow swaps the word under the cursor to its left. But this happens EVERYWHERE; not just in MS Word, not just in TextPad, but in Open File dialogs, in Ameol terminal windows, in fact anywhere there is Windows-based editable text. Transposing characters is the most common typign [sic] error and I want to fix it at a single keystroke. I could do this 15 years ago in EMACS and PC-Write but it took till last year for Microsoft to cotton on with the 'IntelliSense' feature in Word 6.0, and typically this tries to be too smart for its own good - for example it keeps capitalising words I don't want it to. I'd rather keep things under my own control.