EditPad Pro is a convenient text editor with special support for working with RSS feeds and other XML files. EditPad Pro will automatically recognize any file beginning with <?xml as an XML file, and activate the XML support and the XML preferences you specified.
Edit HTML pages, ASP.NET pages and PHP pages, cascading style sheets (CSS files), server side scripts in Perl or Ruby, client side scripts in JavaScript or VBScript, RSS news feeds, etc.
RSS feeds are simply XML files that follow a set of rules to arrange feed entries inside the XML format. One of the key benefits of XML is that the files are for the most part human-readable. They are simply plain text files with some special rules regarding their contents. So a plain text editor like EditPad Pro is perfectly suited for looking at and modifying RSS feeds and other XML files. You can even create XML files from scratch, such as when writing a web site using XHTML.
Unlike many other text editors, EditPad Pro can perfectly handle files with extremely long lines. EditPad Pro’s word wrapping feature offers an interesting twist: wrapped lines can maintain indentation instead of flushing to the left margin. This makes the XML structure much more obvious, while still wrapping long lines to avoid horizontal scrolling. It also makes RSS feeds much easier to read.
EditPad Pro’s syntax coloring makes XML tags, attributes and comments, as well as DTD tags and XML processing instructions, stand out from the actual data such as the text of the RSS news entries. You can edit the XML syntax coloring scheme without restriction if you want to apply some kind of highlighting to the XML data as well. E.g. the provided ASP.NET coloring schemes apply C#, VB and Delphi syntax coloring to the ASP.NET tags sprinkled between the XHTML of an ASP.NET page.
EditPad Pro also ships with several file navigation schemes for XML files, including a specific scheme for RSS newsfeeds. The supplied RSS scheme gives you a list of RSS entries in an RSS newsfeed, rather than showing the raw XML structure of the RSS file as the default XML file navigation scheme does.
Use EditPad Pro’s built-in FTP and SFTP client to upload your RSS feeds to your web server right within EditPad Pro. You can even edit RSS feeds directly on the server via FTP, without having to download the XML files to your computer’s hard disk first. EditPad Pro transfers files in the background, so you’ll never have to wait for all files to download, or for a file you’ve saved to finish uploading. You can go on editing right away after saving, and start editing files before they’ve been downloaded completely. EditPad Pro can stay connected to multiple FTP servers, so you can easily manage multiple feeds on multiple servers.
With the View|Browser command you can instantly preview how your RSS feed will look in your default web browser. Add as many alternative browsers or other RSS readers, RSS validators and other utilities to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu as you want.
With EditPad Pro you can easily maintain very large web sites. There’s no limit to the number of files you can open simultaneously. Arrange RSS and HTML files of different web sites into separate projects to open a site’s files at once and edit them together. Open all files in a folder (and its subfolders) into a project. Many of EditPad Pro’s editing commands can work on all files in a given project at once. Quickly switch between files and projects by clicking on their tabs. Move back and forth with the handy “previous editing position” and “previously edited file” commands. Manage long lists of HTML files and large web sites with the handy file manager sidebar which can rename, move, copy and delete files.
EditPad Pro’s Clip Collection makes it easy to keep a list of text snippets at your fingertips, ready to be inserted into any RSS feed. Such a snippet can be a RSS entry template, a commonly used phrase, a link to your web site, or anything you want. Clips can consist of “before” and “after” parts to be inserted around a selection, which is very convenient for inserting opening and closing HTML or XML tag pairs.
EditPad Pro sports one of the most extensive search-and-replace features of any text editor. Quickly find the part of the file you want to edit. Highlight matches, fold lines, and skip over matches and files. Instantly make many replacements throughout a (rectangular) selection, file, project, or all files in all projects. Use regular expressions and adaptive case options for powerful and dynamic search terms and replacements. Clever use of EditPad Pro’s search-and-replace can automate much tedious editing.
Record and play back keystroke macros to reduce repetitive tasks to a single key combination. Record a search as part of a macro to instantly edit all search matches in any particular way. Save any number of macros to build your own library of high-octane text editing wizards. Any menu item or keystroke can be recorded.
Use rectangular selections to easily edit columns of text. Any editing command that works on a usual linear selection also works on a rectangular selection. Shift and insert columns left and right, move blocks up and down, fill and indent blocks, etc. Handy commands to begin, end, shrink and expand selections make it easy to work with blocks spanning many pages.
Easily edit all kinds of lists with handy commands to sort lines alphabetically and delete duplicate lines. Use these commands with rectangular selections to sort and trim lists of multiple columns on one of the columns.
If you need to type in some special characters not available on your keyboard, you can use EditPad Pro’s character map to quickly insert them by double-clicking on them. Easily insert special symbols like the trademark or copyright symbol into your news feeds, or enter letters from a foreign script that your keyboard does not support. If you save your RSS files with a Unicode encoding (the default is UTF-8), you can use any character known to humanity.
EditPad Pro edits all RSS and XML files. You’ll never have to worry about being unable to open a newsfeed or XML file because it uses an oddball encoding or a different line break style. EditPad Pro handles DOS/Windows, UNIX/Linux and Macintosh line breaks. Open and save RSS feeds encoded in Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32), any Windows code page, any ISO-8859 code page, and a variety of DOS, KOI8 and EBCDIC code pages. EditPad Pro automatically detects the encoding specified in the XML declaration. Convert files between any of these encodings.