LevelsOfDetail

I started a thing at work where I keep a kind of TODO list in a text file. It's a little different from a standard TODO list in that it also has a history of updates for each todo item. It lets me quickly see the list of things that are going on, and what the latest state of each thing was.

I've been using notepad to edit this file, but I get a little annoyed with it.I think the biggest reason is that "ctrl+backspace" doesn't work, which seems bizarre. I mean, isn't it a standard thing in editor widgets?

Anyhow, so I've been mini-obsessed with notepad replacements. The three that I've found that are worth mentioning so far are metapad, notepad2, and notepad++.

Metapad is the most minimal of the bunch. Not really geared toward programmers, but still extremely handy. Aside from supporting Ctrl+backspace, it's other handiest feature is that it auto-linkify's URL's. When half of your state is on a wiki somewhere, this is extremely useful.

Notepad2 is more programmer oriented. It's based on Scintilla, but doesn't go as far as many other programmer-oriented editors go (i.e. no MDI). It's got most of the rest of the standard programming features like line numbers, syntax highlighting, regex search and replace, external file modification monitoring, etc.

Notepad++ takes another step beyond Notepad2 and adds multi-document support as well as some basic file analysis (parsing out function definitions in a side bar, for example). My main beef with it so far is that the default syntax highlighting setup really sucks. Not only does it use different fonts for comments, but the font is proportional. EW!

Anyhow, for my task list file, Metapad is most certainly the right answer. For programming, I think it's a toss up between the Scintilla based alternatives. It depends on your working style.

I had not used Winamp in ages.. not since college probably. At one point in time, it was what everyone used. It was the only good way to play mp3's on Windows.

Fastforward to today, I just discovered that Winamp has full library management capabilities, and a vastly expanded UI.

The UI is actually somewhat similar to one of my favorite Linux players: quod libet. It lets you access quite a few layouts for looking at your library, and each view is even customizable (for example, in your list of artists, you can display how many albums are in the library for that artist).

There are only a couple annoyances.

It recognizes Apple Lossless files, but can't play them. No worry, I can convert them to FLAC, but it's just a pain. That's what I get for using an Apple-specific format I suppose.

Second is that the scrollbars in the UI behave in a weird way. I think it has to do with their window hieararchy, but you end up having to click on each sub-pane for your scroll wheel to work there. All this seems to work in other programs like Firefox, so I wish the Winamp guys would just fix it.. but it seems like they've always been into having their own custom widgetry, so that's what they get.

In trying to work around the second problem, I found out about KatMouse, a generally useful utility for Windows. It essentially lets you use your scroll wheel on windows that don't have focus. This fixes the Winamp problem, but is also useful in other scenarios as well. It's like focus-follows-mouse, but only for scrolling.