PSPad Guide (1/2)

March 16, 2008

Installing PSPad

First of all you have to download the latest version of PSPad. Make sure to get the installer version. Once downloaded double-click the installer to launch the setup.

The installation is pretty straight-forward. I recommend enabling shell-integration if the installer asks for it. This will allow you to open any file with PSPad by a simple right-click and then choosing PSPad in the context menu.

Configuring PSPad

Upon launching PSPad the first time you should see something like this:

Launching PSPad the first time
Launching PSPad the first time

We're going to make some small tweaks:

Tweaking PSPad settings

  1. Go to Settings arrow Program Settings arrow Editor (part 2) and put 1024 for Position of right edge. Then click Apply and Ok to remove the gray vertical line.
  2. Select View arrow Ruler and View arrow Line Numbers to remove the ruler (we're not writing letters) and instead put line numbers which are useful for debugging (errors usually tell you in which code line they occurred).
  3. I have never ever used the left project panel so I suggest you hide it by clicking the top left cube icon and get more working space in return.
  4. Lastly, the yellow line can be turned off in View arrow Active Line if it annoys you.

It now should look like this:

PSPad after some tweaks
PSPad after some tweaks

PSPad features

If you look at some menus and icons you will notice that PSPad looks a bit different than your standard word processor. There are a lot of tools made to ease the programmer's work, such as the code explorer, code highlighting, automatic code insertion, lots of calculators and converters, powerful search & replace, integrated code validation, a hex editor and other useful things. Go to the next chapter for a step-by-step guide on how to use PSPad.