EditPad Pro is a convenient text editor with special support for working with 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.
XML files and file formats based on XML are becoming more and more widespread each day. 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 XML files. You can even create XML files from scratch, such as when writing a web site using XHTML.
XML files or XML databases created by some applications or serialization libraries do not contain line breaks. 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.
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. 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. The default scheme gives you a collapsible tree of all XML container elements in a handy sidebar. It also turns each container element into a collapsible node, allowing you to navigate the actual XML file like a tree, with or without using the sidebar. You can edit file navigation schemes without any restrictions to make them suit any kind of XML-based format. E.g. 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.
Use EditPad Pro’s built-in FTP and SFTP client to upload your XML files to your web server right within EditPad Pro. You can even edit XML files 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.
With the View|Browser command you can instantly preview how your XHTML or XML+XSLT will look in your default web browser. Add as many alternative browsers or other XML processors, validators and utilities to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu as you want. Instantly reformat XML files with XML Tidy, particularly useful for making XML files with all the XML packed onto one line readable.
With EditPad Pro you can easily open and edit many XML files at the same time. There’s no limit. Arrange XML files into multiple projects to open them 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 text files and large projects 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 XML snippets at your fingertips, ready to be inserted into any XML file. Such a snippet can be a single XML tag, a block of nested XML elements, half an XML dataset, 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 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 XML documents, or enter letters from a foreign script that your keyboard does not support. If you save your XML files with a Unicode encoding (the default is UTF-8), you can use any character known to humanity.
EditPad Pro edits all XML files. You’ll never have to worry about being unable to open an 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 XML files 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.
Being a general-purpose text editor, EditPad Pro does not have any XML-specific editing features beyond its powerful plain text editing functionality. However, you can easily add other software such as XSLT processors, schema validators, etc. to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu. You can configure these tools to work directly on the XML file you are viewing in EditPad Pro, and EditPad Pro will automatically reload it when the tool is done. You can have EditPad Pro send the XML file to the processor or processing script via standard input and read it back from the script’s standard output.
Running XML utilities and processors from within EditPad Pro allows you to instantly inspect the results. When editing the processing scripts or XSLT files themselves in EditPad Pro, you can also add the current script (whichever script that is) as a tool allowing you to directly test the script as you are developing it.
Add URLs to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu to run online scripts against the file’s you’re editing. One of the example tools validates the XML schema you’re editing using the W3C’s online XML schema validator.