Site of the Day for Thursday, January 31, 2002 Software of the Month - Treepad For the past few months, the List has been examining software which is used primarily to store those jottings which all too frequently are randomly scattered over any well-used hard drive. Many of the List's gentle members are shaking their heads sadly in acknowledgement at this point, for they too, have a collection of judiciously acquired notes on car tune-ups, dog training tips, and lists of must read books. The problem is they can't find them. To the rescue comes an application type specifically designed to store all these little gems in one convenient location. A further advantage of this type of program is that by consolidating these text files in one umbrella location, hard disc space is also conserved. Treepad 2.8.1 is the freeware version of TreePad Plus and what a well written and user friendly program it is. If you assign an obvious keyboard shortcut to it like "Windows key + T with the previously featured utility "Winkey", Treepad seems to load almost immediately even on a system with modest resources. The interface is intuitive, with what is usually termed an "Explorer type" window, with your list of notes, articles and essays in a tree-like structure in the left pane and the composition editor on the right. Hate being boxed in while you write? The Function keys, 10, 11 and 12 will toggle among various views - tree only, editing window only or the split view. While on the topic of keyboard shortcuts, this application has the easiest selection of shortcuts to use. A simple "Control +Tab will move you from the editing window to the tree pane, while a simple "Tab" by itself will move you back. Highlighting one of the nodes in the tree pane and pressing the "Insert" key will instantly create a new Node / file and deletion is equally simple. If you have a right-click menu key on your keyboard, it will function in both the tree pane and the editing window, making every shortcut even more closely at hand. The editing window allows the user to set the font for size, color and attribute, as well as the background, while these same capabilities are available independently for the tree pane. If you really, really like to compose with white type on a puce background, this program will allow you to do so. Naturally, the usual features of copy / paste and drag and drop are available. Even in its reference to the paid version, the program strives to be useful, for it consists of a few words which appear in the status bar only when changes made to a file have **not** been saved - a rare instance of truly helpful 'advertising'. What places this program over the top in terms of functionality is its ability to import and export individual article files in the simple 'text' format. This means that you can not only easily tidy up those "Notepad" entries you have littering your hard drive but export, as a text file, any deathless prose you may have composed in Treepad. That 5000 word essay on "Appearance and Reality in Troilus and Cressida" can be exported into a proper word processing application, gussied up to the proper formatting requirements and then printed in a matter of a few minutes. If you have more modest requirements, like somewhere to store an address list, gardening information and 87 recipes for brownies, then this is the program for you. Pad over to the website to view screenshots, helpful information and the TreePad download itself - a mere 427Kb zipped - at: http://www.treepad.com A.M. Holm <admin-sotd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Manage your subscription and view the List archives on the web at: <//www.freelists.org/list/sotd> and <//www.freelists.org/archives/sotd> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ UNSUBSCRIBE by sending a blank email to sotd-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with unsubscribe in the Subject field.