Two Cool Tools
Over the past week I came across Notepad2 and SQLyog.
Notepad had always been good enough for me to write ASP and JSP … until one of our clients required a web application in Simplified Chinese. The problem is that Notepad writes an extra character called the BOM mark at the beginning of the file when saving as UTF-8. So I used jEdit. However I don’t appreciate that “Open with jEdit” appears in the context menu for all file types in Explorer. Furthermore, jEdit needs the Java Runtime Environment, which for me is a cumbersome additional requirement. Some of my colleagues use UltraEdit, but there’s no freeware version. I experimented with ConTEXT Programmers Editor, it’s main drawback is that it toggles between saving as Unix, Mac, Windows or Unicode. Then I tried Notepad2.
Why I like Notepad2:
- No need to install: just run the EXE. (Thus one can save it in a USB flash drive and launch it from there for use on other machines).
- Encoding: ANSI/Unicode/Unicode Big Endian/UTF-8/UTF-8 with Signature
- Line Endings: Windows (CR+LF)/Unix (LF)/Mac (CR)
- Indentation Guides! Very useful for HTML
- Zoom In/Zoom Out - good for code overviews
- Toggleable Visual Brace Matching
- One-size-fits-all syntax highlighter (”Web Source Code”)
- Zero-price GPL! (Version 1.0.12)
SQLyog is my replacement for MySQL-Front 2.5 (freeware). MySQL-Front 3.x and above became shareware so I had to stick to MySQL-Front 2.5 although it does not support MySQL 5.x. Then my colleague gave me a preview of SQLyog. I installed it after playing around with it for a few minutes.
I like these features in SQLyog:
- Export as SQL. Very important for porting.
- Resultset editing
- Support for MySQL 5.0
- Support for upgraded password hashing for the `mysql`.`user` table
- Faster data access
- Nice, intuitive UI
- Decent-sized popup window for previewing images
- Direct insertion of files into BLOB fields! Unbelievable.
- SQL Templates: definitely a “wow” feature
- Freeware! (With a nag window during launching and exit … I can live with that)
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