Yeah, Unicode is a always a challenge in Win 9x.

That's why I was already glad of this tiny improvement of metapad in UTF-8....

Edited August 3, 201511 yr by CharlesF

Akelpad sure can do it, try again. Of course you need an adequate font selected (Arial Unicode MS is fine), then you can save your text file in a variety of unicode encoding or as ANSI 932 - Shift-JIS.

 

There won't be any text editor that will automatically select the right font, for this you need to copy as rich text and paste in a rich text editor such as Polyedit Lite.

Yeah, Unicode is a always a challenge in Win 9x.

That's why I was already glad of this tiny improvement of metapad in UTF-8....

 

Akelpad supports UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 as well as a large variety of ANSI encodings. Encoding options in the open/save dialog or by right-clicking the encoding field in the status bar.

Akelpad sure can do it, try again. Of course you need an adequate font selected (Arial Unicode MS is fine), then you can save your text file in a variety of unicode encoding or as ANSI 932 - Shift-JIS.

 

There won't be any text editor that will automatically select the right font, for this you need to copy as rich text and paste in a rich text editor such as Polyedit Lite.

Indeed it can, my bad.    Forgot to select the font first.

 

However, I believe a smart editor can select a Unicode font at least when Unicode text is pasted from clipboard or dragged over. At the very least it could ask the user if they want the text as ANSI (current code page) or Unicode, because clipboard always contains both versions and there are APIs to check clipboard contents.

 

Oh and another thing I just checked (hopefully I'm not wrong again): OS version is English, regional settings are Romanian, I switched keyboard layout to Russian (Japanese IME is not enabled in Akelpad) and the text comes out garbled - the editor doesn't take into account that we are on an ANSI OS with a keyboard layout that doesn't match either OS language or regional language, which should've triggered at least an ANSI codepage conversion if not direct Unicode input. I mean, I can type both Russian and Japanese in an Office document under 98SE - why would it be so hard for other editors to do that? Oh, because nobody cares about 9x anymore, right…

However, I believe a smart editor can select a Unicode font at least when Unicode text is pasted from clipboard or dragged over. At the very least it could ask the user if they want the text as ANSI (current code page) or Unicode, because clipboard always contains both versions and there are APIs to check clipboard contents.

 

And which Unicode font is it going to choose? It would need to parse all installed fonts to select one  that has got a corresponding unicode plane. AFAIK (I might be wrong) no text editor does this regardless of OS.

 

The closest to this is probably Babelpad  adequately  configured  in composite font mode.

 

I would not know anything about the rest as i don't use IME but I suspect that if you select the right codepage (or some UTF flavor) in Akelpad it might work OK.

Edited August 3, 201511 yr by loblo

Akelpad supports UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 as well as a large variety of ANSI encodings. Encoding options in the open/save dialog or by right-clicking the encoding field in the status bar.

 

Indeed Akelpad is very impressive.

I will give it a further exploration.

 

However, I believe a smart editor can select a Unicode font at least when Unicode text is pasted from clipboard or dragged over. At the very least it could ask the user if they want the text as ANSI (current code page) or Unicode, because clipboard always contains both versions and there are APIs to check clipboard contents.

 

And which Unicode font is it going to choose? It would need to parse all installed fonts to select one  that has got a corresponding unicode plane. AFAIK (I might be wrong) no text editor does this regardless of OS.

 

The closest to this is probably Babelpad  adequately  configured  in composite font mode.

 

I would not know anything about the rest as i don't use IME but I suspect that if you select the right codepage (or some UTF flavor) in Akelpad it might work OK.

 

Many applications lose userbase because of badly chosen defaults and unintuitive behavior.

 

One can choose a default codepage, a codepage for new file but it's of no use - still garbled text. Moreover, once there's English text and Japanese text in the same window/document it appears very clear that document should be treated as Unicode. Still, input from keyboard layout other than system default will appear in the default ANSI encoding, regardless even of the chosen font's codepage.

 

I have Babelpad 1.9.3 built in 2005 but couldn't get it to do the job. I'll let this rest for now.

The main problem I have with Notepad, that still continues to this day, is opening text files with Unix-style line endings. Of course Wordpad and stuff like Notepad++ can handle them, but it would be so convenient if good ol' regular Notepad could display newlines correctly when I double-click the file.

it would be so convenient if good ol' regular Notepad could display newlines correctly when I double-click the file.

Choose a Notepad replacement like one of the above, rename it 'Notepad.exe' and drop it in place of the original. You will enjoy the 'good old Notepad' with so many more features

metapad for this purpose is very light in one file, that means fast.

 

You could even use a reg patch to open any non-associated file in Notepad by default.

Edited August 5, 201511 yr by CharlesF

On a side note, I recently got a query about the asterisk in Notepad indicating a change in file content. On checking I found that in all the versions I checked, XP, W7, W8, and W8.1 the native notepad.exe had NO asterisk! Apparently, Ms finally learned that folks like that and added it to W10! My friend had been using a modded XP which I'd substituted Notepad2 for the original many many years ago. Both Notepad2 and Notepad++ sport that asterisk. I prefer Notepad++ for just about everything, though I have't played with many others like EditPlus, MetaPad, or AkelPad, though I've used and like TextPad. :^)

 

Drugwash, let us know if you code an editor, okay?

Dunno, might not happen in this life, so don't hold your breath.