Running EditPad Pro on Linux Using Wine

Configuring EditPad Pro for Linux

EditPad Pro is an extremely configurable text editor. The default setting are optimized to let Windows users get started immediately without configuring anything. This means that Linux users have a bit of work. Start with selecting Options|Preferences in the menu. On the Cursors tab, select the "standard I-beam" mouse pointer. Wine doesn't correctly draw EditPad Pro's custom pointers. On the System tab, turn off the option to show an icon in the system tray. Wine's imitation of the Windows system tray is not very handy. Click OK to accept the Preferences. Next, select Options|Configure File Types in the menu. You'll need to change the default encoding for most, if not all, file types. Click on the Encoding tab. Click on each of the file types in the list (one by one), and change the encoding settings. Set the default line break style to Linux (LF only). If the default text encoding is a Windows code page, change it into an ISO-8859 code page or UTF-8. If you're unsure, select UTF-8. Most modern Linux distributions use UTF-8 for all text files. You may also need to turn on the option not to write the byte order marker. Byte order markers are far less common on Linux than on Windows, and some applications cannot handle them.

EditPad Pro 6 running on Ubuntu Linux 5.10 via Wine

Glitches Running EditPad Pro with Wine

When I tested EditPad Pro 6 on an Ubuntu 5.10 installation in VMware, I noticed a number of minor issues. When starting EditPad Pro from a terminal, the terminal would show a large number of CreateBitmap errors. It seems Wine has trouble with EditPad Pro's alpha-blended icons. However, all the toolbar icons appear just fine. Some tree views may show black icons, but this is only a cosmetic issue.

At intervals, the main menu would stop responding to mouse clicks. Pressing Alt+Letter to access the menu would make the menu bar responsive again each time.

EditPad's custom mouse pointer appears corrupted. Selecting the standard I-beam in Options, Preferences, Cursors fixes this.

I also found that Wine doesn't seem to properly handle HTML Help files (*.chm) yet. I find this a bit odd, since Microsoft has deprecated WinHelp with the launch of Windows Vista, leaving HTML Help as the only standard help format. While the items under the Help menu do work, Wine doesn't display the table of contents of the .chm file. The body text does appear. Hopefully this will be resolved in future releases of Wine. In the mean time, you can try the kchm CHM viewer for KDE, or you can use the PDF file included with EditPad Pro as your documentation. The PDF includes exactly the same text as the CHM file.

The Print feature in EditPad won't work if your Linux PC is set up to use the lpr printing system. Wine does not fully support lpr. If you started EditPad Pro from the console, when trying to print, you would see something like this: fixme:winspool:WINSPOOL_EnumPrinters We don't handle PRINTER_ENUM_CONNECTIONS. You can fix this by removing the lpr package installed on your Linux system, and use CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) instead. Please check the documentation with your Linux distribution or your local Linux guru on how to uninstall lpr and use CUPS instead.

Integration with RegexBuddy via the Search|RegexBuddy menu item doesn't work properly, because Wine does not fully automate the COM system that EditPad Pro and RegexBuddy use to communicate. You can start RegexBuddy separately and copy/paste your regular expressions between EditPad and RegexBuddy.

Other than that, everything seems to work just fine. EditPad Pro can access all files on the Linux system directly. File|Open, Project|Open Folder and the Explorer Panel all work perfectly.