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FREE Freeware Notepad Replacement Notepad++ notepad++ examples Open Source SourceForge

5 Great Notepad++ Features

Notepad++ is probably the best text editor for Windows – and it’s FREE. It has a huge range of features for working with text files, scripts, HTML files, etc.  Here are some pointers on just a few of those features.

1. Set Language to match your code
One very nice feature of Notepad++ is the ability to color pieces of code. This is very useful when writing C, SQL, HTML or other types of files, allowing you to easily visually distinguish between functions, reserved words, comments, text, and other types of symbols and expressions in your code.

Notepad++ will automatically detect your code based upon the language selected. You can specify the language yourself or Notepad++ will set it based on the file extension.

HTML as text before specifying language.

HTML code after specifying language.

2. Bulk find & replace
If you want to replace a certain entry in your file(s), Notepad++ is the ticket. Not only can it instantly search through all entries in a file, it can search all open files or even all files in a directory (including sub-directories), including, matching only certain file types.

3. Search and replace using regular expressions
When it comes to finding what you want, Notepad++ is not limited to mere words. You can also use powerful regular expression to match dynamic entries. For example, the below search will find (and replace) all tags in the source of HTML files, regardless of the actual image size specified:

Of course, some knowledge of regular expressions is required to use this feature. Not surprisingly, these regular expressions will also serve you well if you dabble in the Linux command line with sed or awk commands.

4. Tidy HTML code

If you’re writing web articles, there’s a fair chance your code will include a bit of unnecessary breaks, misaligned tags and so forth. Notepad++ can Tidy your HTML code.
For example, here is some unformatted text:

Which we want to format with HTML:

5. Save all open files
While this may not sound too exciting, imagine you have several open files – Notepad++ behaves like Firefox in this regard and opens documents in tabs – each one changed after you ran a bulk find & replace earlier. Saving them one by one can be tedious. Notepad++ saves you the hassle. You can save all open files at once.

Similarly, you can close them all at once.

Conclusion

Notepad++ is an extremely powerful and useful tool. We only scratched the surface on its features. With Notepad++ you can use macros or function completion, compare documents, export files to other formats, and a whole lot more.

Notepad++ also has many useful plugins and it comes in a portable version.

More on Notepad++

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Encryption FREE Linux Open Source Passwords SourceForge TrueCrypt Utility Windows

TrueCrypt – Free Open Source Industrial Strength Encryption

TrueCrypt provides a solution for encrypting sensitive data – everything from portable, mountable volumes to entire hard disks.  Encrypting your data renders that access useless, even if your computer or your thumbdrive falls into the wrong hands.

And TrueCrypt makes it not only easy, but nearly un-crackable.  TrueCrypt is both open source and FREE.

There are two approaches to using TrueCrypt:

  • Whole Drive Encryption – you can use TrueCrypt to encrypt your entire hard disk, including your boot partition. In order to boot the machine, you must first supply your pass phrase to enable decryption. Once booted, data is automatically and transparently encrypted and decrypted as it travels to and from the disk. Once your machine is turned off, the data is unrecoverable without knowing the pass phrase.
  • Container Encryption – with this approach you create a single file on your computer’s hard drive that is encrypted. You then “mount” that file using TrueCrypt, supplying the correct pass phrase to decrypt it after which the contents of that file appear as another drive on your system. Reading from and writing to that “drive” automatically and transparently decrypts and encrypts the data. Once the drive is unmounted, the data is once again unrecoverable without knowing the pass phrase.

TrueCrypt is both simple and elegant.

Most users prefer container based encryption for its portability, and for the fact that you need only mount the encrypted drive when you need access. You could keep personal information in a TrueCrypt container that could be regularly copied between machines, onto a thumbdrive, and even backed up to the Internet. When you need to access the encrypted data, simply mount it, specify your pass phrase to unlock it, and use the files that are stored within it.

TrueCrypt is not tied to any one platform, your user account or anything else; just the pass phrase. In fact, you can copy your encrypted file to another machine entirely and mount it with TrueCrypt. Even using other operating systems such as Mac or Linux.

Here are a couple of important caveats:

  • Encryption does not make a bad pass phrase any more secure. If you choose an obvious pass phrase, an attack can certainly be mounted that could unlock your encrypted volume. This is why we talk about pass phrase instead of password. Use a multi-word phrase that you can remember to be the key to your encrypted data, and it’ll be much, much more difficult to break.
  • An encrypted volume does you no good if the files you care about are also elsewhere on your machine.
  • Make sure you have secure backups, updated regularly. Preferably keep them UNencrypted, but secure in some other way, in case you lose your encrypted volume or forget your pass phrase. If you’ve chosen a good passphrase, without it the data is not recoverable.

TrueCrypt is FREE open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux

TrueCrypt Features:

Data encryption is an important part of an overall security strategy. TrueCrypt can be a key part of that strategy.

Download TrueCrypt.

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CLI Command Line FTP GNU HTTP HTTPS Linux Open Source Passwords SourceForge WGET wget examples Windows

GNU WGet for Windows (Windows 7, Vista, XP, etc.)

Whether you need a quick-and-dirty way to download a file via HTTP, HTTPS or FTP; or test a web page or recursively download a whole site, WGET is a great tool for the task.

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc., on both Windows- or *nix-based systems.

GNU Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire web or FTP sites easy, including:

  • Resume aborted downloads, using REST and RANGE
  • Use filename wild cards and recursively mirror directories
  • NLS-based message files for many different languages
  • Optionally converts absolute links in downloaded documents to relative, so that downloaded documents may link to each other locally
  • Runs on most UNIX-like operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows
  • Supports HTTP proxies
  • Supports HTTP cookies
  • Supports persistent HTTP connections
  • Unattended / background operation
  • Uses local file timestamps to determine whether documents need to be re-downloaded when mirroring
  • GNU Wget is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Wget has an extensive set of options, the full list of which can be viewed from the command line with “wget –help.”  Here are a few useful examples

Example 1 – Download the default page for given site to your current directory:

wget powercram.com

Example 2 – Recursively download the default page plus an additional level based on links from the default page:

wget -r -l 2 powercram.com

Example 3 – This will do as in example 2, additionally specifying username and password if required by site:

wget -r -l 2 --random-wait --http-user=powercram --http-password=powercram powercram.com

Example 4 – WGET can be used to recursively mirror your site, including download all the images, css and javascript, etc., and localize all of the URLS (so the site works on your local machine).  You can even save all the pages as .html files.

– To mirror your site:

wget -r http://www.powercram.com

– To mirror the site and localize all of the URLs:

wget --convert-links -r http://www.powercram.com

– To mirror the site and save the files as .html:

wget --html-extension -r http://www.powercram.com

Download WGet for Windows, install it, play with it and have some fun.

GNU wget runs on any version of Windows, including 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, Windows 7.

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Email Marketing Linux Open Source OpenEMM Windows

OpenEMM is a feature-rich enterprise software for professional e-mail newsletters and e-mail marketing

OpenEMM is a feature-rich enterprise software for professional e-mail newsletters and e-mail marketing. It offers sophisticated bounce management, link tracking, lots of statistics and a script feature to set up transaction mails (data, event and time triggered).

OpenEMM is the first open source application for e-mail marketing. Its code base has been developed since 1999 and is used (as part of the commercial ASP product E-Marketing Manager) by companies like IBM, Siemens and Deutsche Telekom.

OpenEMM offers already more than 95% of the functionality of most commercial products and some features commercial products do not offer right now (i.e. MySQL support).

The main difference is, that OpenEMM is an easy to set up single server solution, while its big brother E-Marketing Manager operates on several distributed servers as software on demand (ASP).

To provide you with free service & support several selfservice categories are operated on this website such as a FAQ database and support forums. The available content is continuously enhanced by feedback from the OpenEMM user community!

http://www.openemm.org/home.html