Urgent help required

[chrisvenus]

I have a problem. A techie problem of a sorts. I am at the bbc on a different computer than normal and I have no HTML editor except for notepad. Since I would prefer something that can at least handle multiple files and will preferably do nice things with HTML I am looking for an alternative.

I tried to download a trial copy of Homesite and install it but on this nice win2k computer I have no access to the program files directory and no administrator access or passwords. I could probably tell the program to install elsewhere but installshield wants to update something in its directory in program files and can't.

So basically any suggestions on a nice win2k editor that will do multiple files and preferably have HTML support?

Alternatively any suggestions on how to get around these restriction I have? E-mailing me on my work address will probably be helpful if you have a solution but I will try to check back here after I've had my lunch.

Thanks all and sorry for those that were looking forward to an exciting update on my life. :)

Comments

[borange.livejournal.com]

no word access?

2k can be a prob (sic) if you dont have privs for stuff

and I cant realy think of anything that useful that doesn't require proggy files access :o(

Eeep

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what borange said. Virtually no way to install anything if you're not Admin. That's kinda the point.

The only thing which might work is Emacs. See:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/big.html

I wouldn't call it an HTML editor, but it's waaaay better than NotePad and does have a few HTML-oriented features, such as an HTML mode.

Re: Eeep

[chrisvenus]

Yeah, I thought there was no way to install anything but there are some things that don't require installation due to either being a single executable or due to the fact that you just need to unzip them to a location and they work. I was hoping for something along these lines.

Does emacs do regular expressions? In particular substitutions for particularly comlicated ones? I ask because it would be really helpful since I've just spent an hour making the same adjustments to some subtley different pages and regular expressions would work nicely for that. I'm not a big emacs fan on UNIX boxes and I've always had alternatives on windows machines. Now might be the time to turn though. My plan for this evening though is to see if I can cheat an install of homesite at home by just copying the files from another directory. If I can do that then I'll just e-mail them to me at work. :) Or maybe put them somewhere downloadable.

Anyway, cheers for the feedback.

Re: Eeep

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

"Does Emacs do regular expressions ?"

Yep, rather well in fact.

Use (for example): M-x query-replace-regexp

I'm not going to attempt to summarise the syntax here. The built-in help will tell you about it.

Re: Eeep

[chrisvenus]

Well, I've downloaded it and I think I'll spend the 15 mins til I need to go home playing with it and working out how it works. The main problem being it doesn't seem to be usingthe normal windows software way of doing things. It took me a while to work out how to create a new file... no file new anywhere, instead you just open a file that doesn't exist...

Oh well, I'll get used to it I guess. :) Don't suppose you know how to do HTML highlighting since I didn't notice it in the menus at a glance...

Re: Eeep

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Sorry, no - I detest all forms of highlighting and consequently switch them off !

Generic hints regarding emacs:

• If you want to look up things, use the web, 'cos loads of people use emacs.


• If one of the commands annoys you, write yourself a '.emacs' file to map it to something else. This isn't as hard as it (maybe) sounds.


• Keyboard macros are very, very helpful.


• The built-in help actually is quite helpful.


• Most things can be done using M-x <something> so you don't have to memorise a million stupid keystroke combinations.


• It's far better than 'vi'/'vim', which suck !

Re: Eeep

[markbanang.livejournal.com]

Since someone had to go and suggest emacs, I think that it is my duty to suggest WinVi: http://www.winvi.de/en/

It comes as a straight exe (no install program) so should work on any machine. It is a pretty decent implementation of vi, but if you are not a vi fan already then you probably shouldn't bother (many people hate moded editors). Long gone are the days when you couldn't be a 'real programmer' without knowing how to do an animation using vi macros. *8')

[borange.livejournal.com]

hmm see my email as well for the asp web matrix thingy

I use it for other stuff so no idea what the html stuff looks like in it

guess I all have got too used to having BOFH permissions :o)

[chrisvenus]

I looked at that but it requires the .NET Framework and I didn't think it would be even worth seeing if I could install that. :)

[borange.livejournal.com]

hmm well the .NET framework is a 'windows update' thingy so figured they might have done it already

but then again who knows :)