A collection of Windows Explorer shell extensions for text editors.
Copyright John Brandwood 2014.
Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
(See the accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or the copy at http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
| Home | URL |
|---|---|
| Files / Forum / Wiki | https://sourceforge.net/projects/editwith |
| Source | https://github.com/jbrandwood/editwith |
These shell extension DLLs add either 1 or 2 menu entries to the right-click (context) menu of Windows Explorer, depending upon whether the text editor is already running.
For example, the extension for the Notepad++ editor will add ...
- Edit with Notepad++
- Edit in existing Notepad++ session
The text editor's icon is also displayed with each entry to make it easy to distinguish your text editor from other context menu entries.
The shell extensions are designed to work on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, from Windows XP all the way up to Windows 8.1
Shell extension DLLs are supplied for the following text editors ...
| Text Editor | Extension |
|---|---|
| Brackets | bshellx |
| EditPad Pro | eppshellx |
| EditPlus 3 | ep3shellx |
| EmEditor | emeshellx |
| Komodo Edit / Komodo IDE | kshellx |
| Multi-Edit | meshellx |
| Notepad++ | nppshellx |
| Programmer's Notepad 2 | pn2shellx |
| PSPad | pspshellx |
| SciTE | scishellx |
| SlickEdit | seshellx |
| Sublime Text 2 | su2shellx |
| Sublime Text 3 | su3shellx |
| TextPad | tpshellx |
| UEStudio | uesshellx |
| UltraEdit | ueshellx |
| VEDIT | vshellx |
| Vim | vimshellx |
| Zeus IDE | zshellx |
My editor already shows up in the right-click menu, why should I use this?
Because unlike your editor's existing entry, it allows you to choose whether to open up the files that you've selected in either a new editor session, or to send the files to ANY existing editor session.
This makes is easy to not only edit multiple files in one session, but also to have multiple editor sessions at once. It makes it easier to keep groups of files separate in different windows, and/or to efficiently use multiple monitors.
Does it offer any other advantages?
It's smaller, lighter, faster, and can jump tall buildings in a single leap!
But seriously ... compare simple sizes and how much of your computer's memory is used to provide these features.
This shell extension takes less than 30KB of disk space, and when Windows Explorer runs it, it uses the same DLL resources that Explorer already uses, so that it doesn't take much extra computer memory (i.e. MSVCRT.DLL).
By extreme comparison, the Notepad++ shell extension (NppShell_06.dll) takes 218KB of disk space, and then still loads up the 637KB MSVCR90.DLL.
That's a lot of disk space and computer resources for something that does less than this shell extension.
In fairness, most other text editor's current shell extensions are a lot slimmer at 60KB to 110KB, and don't pull in the 637KB MSVCR90/100/110.DLL.
Some of the other text editor's current shell extensions either don't render an icon, or render it at the wrong size (i.e. ignore Windows's requested size), or even render it incorrectly (i.e. on a pure-white background).