Autocompletion.

This will prompt for you to complete repeated or known text for the relevant language you are working with:

• Settings > Preferences > Backup/Auto-Completion

• Tick enable auto-completion on each input, and leave it as function completion. You can start from the 2nd character or more if you find it annoying. Press the <enter> or <tab> keys to automatically populate the full word.

TextFX Settings

TextFX can perform automatic closing of (X)HTML and XML tags through the following setting:

• TextFX > TextFX Settings > Autoclose XHTML/XML <Tag>

• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Safari
• Chrome

However, depending on where these browsers are installed on your computer they may not work. For example, I have Firefox Portable installed, so, the command to launch it is D:\Programs\Firefox\FirefoxPortable.exe.

To update the shortcuts listed on the Run menu, you need to edit the file shortcuts.xml in the NotePad++ installation directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\NotePad++\shortcuts.xml). However there’s a catch. You can’t edit this file with NotePad++. Instead, edit with another text editor (e.g. plain old NotePad). If you edit this file with NotePad++ the changes won’t persist – and the file will be reset back to its defaults.

Here’s the change I made to the file for Firefox Portable:

<Command name="Launch in Firefox" Ctrl="yes" Alt="yes" Shift="yes" Key="88">
D:\Programs\Firefox\FirefoxPortable.exe &quot;$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)&quot;
</Command>

What I wanted was the really simple interface, theme and explorer you get with TextMate. I just had two conditions:

1. I didn’t want to switch to a Mac. We’re not all made of money. Although I hear you can power a Mac with your own sense of self-satisfaction
2. I wasn’t going to switch to a paid editor (at least not without exploring the free/open source alternatives first) like eTextEditor or Sublime Editor. Something open source would be good too.

The solution came pretty quickly as soon as I found out you can convert TextMate themes to NotePad++ themes.  Another great feature is the plugins manager which makes it easy to install a number of really useful plugins.

Here’s how my NotePad++ now looks running on Windows 7 (Consolas font) using the Railscast theme and Explorer plugin:

I know, I know, no TextMate bundles but hey, you can’t have it all, and I’m just a wannabe Mac fan boy anyway. Also I wish they would hurry up and update the NotePad++ icon. It looks like something that survived from Windows 95

Its a good walk through on how to use the major features in Git with plenty of helpful screen shots.

On a related note:

• Check out this article by Lins about why we should stop developing for IE6
• Check out this article by NetTuts+ about 9 common IE bugs and how to fix them

Finally I settled on TeraCopy, a GUI file copy tool which has a portable version. All up it took about 4 hours to copy across a wireless network. Best thing is you can pause/resume if there are any network drops and you get instant feedback about the copy process. The remaining time is also a little bit more reliable than Microsoft time!

These include:

• XAMPP – Apache-MySQL-PHP and Perl server (its portable too)
• WAMP Server -  Apache-MySQL-PHP for Windows
• InstantRails – An instant Ruby on Rails Development Server
• The Uniform Server – Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP, there’s also a Tomcat Plugin
• Server2Go – Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP-Perl and also supports SQLite