When adding a tool to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu, there are three pages of settings that you can make for each tool. On the “Definition” page you can set the basic options needed to add any application to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu.
“Caption” is the caption that this tool’s menu item in the Tools menu will have. If you want to make a certain character an access key shortcut in the menu, precede it with an ampersand (&). The character that follows the ampersand will be shown underlined in the menu (unless you disabled the underlining of access key shortcuts in Windows).
Check “add to Tools toolbar” if you want a button for the tool to appear on the Tools toolbar. This toolbar is hidden by default. You can make it visible by right-clicking on the main menu or any toolbar and selecting Tools.
Check “show caption tool toolbar” if you want the toolbar button for the tool to show the caption that you specified. If not, only the tool’s icon is shown. The icon is automatically loaded from the file or application you specify on the command line. Showing the caption can be useful if you have multiple tool configurations for the same application. It does make the tool take up much more space on the toolbar. Items in the Tools menu always show the caption.
“Hint” is the text that will be shown in the status bar when the mouse is pointing at this tool’s menu item in the Tools menu. You may leave this blank if the caption is descriptive enough.
If you will be using the tool often, you can assign a keyboard shortcut key combination to it. Click on the “shortcut key” field, and then press the shortcut key combination you want on the keyboard. E.g. if you press F2 on the keyboard, the “shortcut key” field will display F2. The menu item for the tool in the Tools menu will also indicate F2. When you press F2 on the keyboard while working with EditPad Pro, the tool will be run. To remove the shortcut from the tool, click in the “shortcut key” field and press the backspace key on the keyboard.
For the “Command Line”, you need to type in what you would type in if you were to launch the tool from the Run item in the Windows Start menu. It is best to include the full path to the executable and any file parameters. Note that you must not use the <, > or | characters for file redirection. If you need file redirection, use the Standard I/O page. If the path to the tool’s executable has spaces in it, you must enclose it in double quotes. Click the Browse button to browse for the executable file.
If you specify a document file instead of an executable file as the command line, then EditPad Pro will launch the document’s associated application, and pass the document file as a parameter. Windows Explorer does the same when you double-click on a document.
If you specify a URL as the command line, then EditPad Pro opens the URL in the web browser configured in the System Preferences.
“Working Folder” is the folder that will appear to be the current one to the tool when it is run by EditPad Pro.
You can use special path placeholders to use the full path to the file you are currently editing, or parts of the file name or path in the command line or in the working folder. If you have marked any of the four temporary file options (see below), you can also use placeholders for the path and file name of the temporary file. There are also path placeholders that allow you to select one of the files open in EditPad Pro or a file on disk to be passed on the command line. Note that many applications cannot handle file names with spaces in them on the command line, unless they are enclosed by double quotes. So it is best to always put double quotes around paths you compose using path placeholders, like I did in the above screen shot.
Click the Placeholders button to get a screen listing all path placeholders, making it easy to use them on the command line. The screen will use the file and project you currently have open in EditPad as example paths. If the active file or project are untitled, the example will be a dummy path. The temporary file placeholders will only be available if you’ve turned on at least one of the options to open or save a temporary file.
When running EditPad Pro from a removable drive, the drive might get a different drive letter if it is inserted into another computer. In that situation, you should reference other applications stored on the same device using the %EPPDRIVE% and %EPPPATH% path placeholders. Then your tools will always reference the files on your drive, regardless of the drive letter it gets.
Since most tools will only make sense when used on a file of a certain type, you can select the file types this tool applies to in the list at the right. Do this by ticking the appropriate checkboxes. Not ticking any checkbox has the same effect as ticking all of them. The Tools menu will show all the tools that apply to the type of file you are currently editing.