Recommended Software
All the applications listed on this page
are tools that I use myself all the time and can recommend without
reservation. I do not earn any money on any of these recommendations.
I only list a program here if I use it myself and find that it is
of truly exceptional quality. Promised.
FAR HTML
An
indispensable toolkit for help authors
 This
program is the Swiss army knife of help authoring and has so many
modules and powerful functions that it's impossible to do justice
to it in just a couple of paragraphs. I only discovered it relatively
recently and I wish I'd known about it earlier.
The HTML-friendly Advanced Search and Replace feature alone
makes FAR indispensable for both help and web authoring work. With
it you can search and replace simultaneously in entire directory
trees containing thousands of files, with really complex commands
including multiple substrings. The syntax takes a little getting
used to but it is much simpler than regular
expressions and nearly as powerful, with multiple substrings,
searching for any text between beginning and end strings and more.
Other features include complex file copying, zip compression, DOS
batch file (.bat) generation, help project editors for HTML Help
and MS Help 2, a TOC and Index editor and much more. It has a very
long fully-functional trial period and costs $49 to buy, and is
worth every penny several times over.
Website
and Downloads
KeyText Keyboard Macros
The ideal tool for automating Help & Manual
One
of the few things missing from Help & Manual for heavy-duty
work is a macro programming language. KeyText from MJMSOFT solves
this problem and also provides much more advanced functionality,
and it only costs $25. This is another program that is worth its
asking price many times over.
What makes KeyText superior to the many other keyboard macro programs
around is the ease with which you can create and edit even complex
macros and the many powerful features, including user interaction.
It's very easy to create dialogs for user input, and the data entered
by the user can then be used in the macro.
Other macro programs may be better for recording and replaying
Windows tasks, but KeyText is unsurpassed when it comes to adding
features to a program like Help & Manual.
You will find KeyText particularly useful if you frequently use
Help & Manual's Insert Plain HTML Code... feature in
HTML Help and browser-based HTML. It makes it easy to program sequences
in which repeated code is entered automatically at the press of
a hotkey, displaying interactive dialogs in which you enter the
variable information manually. In addition to radically speeding
up your work this also reduces errors, because only "tested"
code is inserted.
For an example of the kind of thing you can do with KeyText in
Help & Manual see the Genuine Popups in Browser-based HTML
tutorial in the Tutorials & Guides Section of the H&M Forum
(you must register and log in to the forum to be able to access
this section).
Website
and Downloads
EmEditor
A truly superlative editor for help authors and
web coders
 If
you frequently edit HTML and other code files manually have a look
at EmEditor by Yutaka Emura. I've used a lot of editors over the
last few years but once I had tried it the decision to switch to
EmEditor for all my manual editing tasks took less than half an
hour.
This is one of those rare programs that simply does everything
right. If there's any function you've been missing in an editor,
EmEditor probably has it. And it also has a lot of amazingly useful
functions you never thought of — like New and Paste
from the System Tray, which opens a new editing window with the
text in the Windows clipboard.
Things like this may sound trivial, but when an entire program
is designed with this level of attention to detail and genuinely
useful functionality the result is a tool that is simply a joy to
use. Other features of EmEditor include full Unicode support, full
support for regular
expressions, stellar syntax highlighting for just about every
language under the sun, browser preview support for web editing,
over 4GB file capability, OLE and D&D, plug-ins and external
tools (a number of programmers have produced some good plug-ins)
and much more.
Highly recommended. Check it out.
Website
and Downloads
Total Commander
The perfect file manager
 There
are not enough good things to say about Total Commander,
previously known as Windows Commander. It is quite simply
the best Windows file manager in existence, and it is always
the first program I install when I re-install Windows or set up
a new computer.
In addition to the perfectly ergonomic dual-directory
structure that Microsoft should have introduced fifteen years ago
it is also packed with other features. It has one of the best FTP
clients I've ever seen (fully integrated in the file manager), multiple-format
file compression and archive management, intelligent multi-rename,
compare by content and much more besides.
Total Commander is also packed with clever features that
allow you to perform complex customized tasks that would normally
only be possible with complex manual commands and pipes. I can't
recommend this program highly enough. Get it today and forget about
Windows Explorer forever. (I feel particularly safe in praising
this program so effusively because Ghisler.com doesn't have an affiliate
program and I don't earn a single cent if you buy it.)
Website
and Downloads
TheBat! — An Email Client for Power Users
 Do
you have multiple email accounts and providers? - Do you have a huge database of thousands of
mails you want to be able to search in seconds?
- Do you want full control over your email program?
- Would you like different message format templates
for accounts, folders, recipient groups and even individual recipients?
- Would you like fully programmable mail filtering
rules with full support for regular expressions and regular expression
macros?
- Would you like an email client that has full
integrated PGP support, can display HTML mails without activating
web bugs or any other malicious code, and that has none of the
virus transport channels that plague one very well-known competitor?
If you answered yes to more than a couple of these questions and
can live with an email client that cannot send HTML mails (it can
read them, it just can't send them) then TheBat! from Moldavia
may be for you.
Be warned that this program is definitely not for everyone. Whilst
its user interface has improved over the last couple of years TheBat!
still can't be accused of being radically intuitive, and the WinHelp
online help is a masterpiece of poor structure, incomprehensible
programmer-written prose and an infuriating lack of explanations
and references in the places where you need them most.
That being said, however, I would still never even consider using
another email program. If you have lots of accounts, massive mail
volume and email is the lifeline of your daily work then you may
feel the same once you get used to it. TheBat! has a devoted,
Linux-like following (it's actually better than any mail client
I've ever tried on Linux, and that's saying something) with excellent
mailing lists that provide good help and support. There's even a
turbocharged version called SecureBat! that combines hardware
authentication with mail servers, on-the-fly encryption of all locally-stored
data and OpenPGP or S/MIME techniques to protect messages in transit.
This is another program that I'm recommending just because I love
it. RIT Labs doesn't have an affiliate program so I don't make a
cent from the recommendation, but it's a program that deserves to
succeed, despite its shortcomings.
TheBat!
product page
RIT Labs main
page
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