Just a few days ago, I received build 6.9.1 of Oraspeed’s Big Editor. The new version has taken into consideration what I have written in this blog about my first experience of it. Since the time I downloaded this new version, I have created quite a few pages with it.

• the index page of TipzNTrix which is a customization of a GetTemplate theme-layout for WordPress
• three pages now posted at Biblista.Net (first written in BigEditor and then copied and pasted on Biblista’s Drupal site)
• this page (which I am going to copy and paste have copied and pasted into this blog application)

As a response to my rantings in this blog about the Big Editor, I was told the following:

• that the Big Editor no longer has a splash screen that one cannot turn off
• that the Code template feature is functioning and that one can add to it
• that one can double-click on an image appearing in the File Explorer and inserted as an image tag into the editor
• that there is a save to and open from remote FTP feature. (In fact, they even added an “Open File” icon to make the feature more explicit)

These were the first things I checked and while creating the pages mentioned above, I had a new experience of the capabilities and bugs of the Big Editor.

First, I must say that the Big Editor loads faster now. Although my objection to the splash screen was that there is no option to turn it off, I appreciate what the developers did to simply take it off. I remember the case of HTML Beauty which had a splash screen bearing the picture of Carmen Electra. As long as male teenagers were using the editor, they kept mum about it. But when more people outside the circle of the author’s friends began using the software (the author was still in high school when HTML Beauty became a hit in free download centers way back in 2000), complaints like “I can’t work with it when my wife is around” (from a married adult programmer) or “how do I hide the splashscreen from my boys” (this one from a Mom) began to be posted in the author’s forum. Eventually Mr. Maxx (the author) had to take out the splash screen. Anyhow, I find it useless anyway. It doesn’t add anything to one’s coding, and a splash screen doesn’t guarantee a nice webpage or script.

Second, I did find out why the Code Template didn’t seem to function. I went to Tools –> Options –>Code Template and added some codes and I expected it to appear there! (Or was I wrong to think that?) What I did this time around was to do the same thing and then look at it from a different place, not from the “Code Snippets” toggle, but from the “Short Cuts” button. It was there that I found the code snippet I added.

But if one accesses the code templates one adds via the Short Cuts button, what is the use of the Code Snippet’s toggle? Related to this is the problem I found when clicking on the Short Cuts: it won’t paste the code I wanted!

Code snippets were a feature of xSite, a leading HTML cum WYSIWYG editor back in 1999 until its development stopped. Code snippets were also a feature of HTML Beauty, Mr. Maxx’s editor. In the case of these editors, creating a Code Snippet was easy. One went File –>Create New –>Save As Snippet. The first line automatically became the name/title of the code. One can add a description of the code through a <– Comment –>. It was accessible through a Snippet Pane which was located as one of the toggles of the explorer panel. I miss that feature in a lot of HTML editors nowadays and was hoping that Oraspeed’s Big Editor had one that was functional. I see the Code Snippet panel, but I can’t get my code snippets on a webpage.

Third, I was told that double-clicking on an image in the File Explorer would insert it as an image tag into my webpage. I did that but BigEditor opened the graphic as a file inside the editor!

One can do this procedure better using the Insert Graphic button, but the tag produced isn’t HTML 4.0 compliant; and it is given in an absolute path. BigEditor should “learn” to create image tags compliant to HTML 4.0 and to give a relative path.

Fourth, about BigEditor’s FTP facility. I must say that between the time I made my first review of BigEditor and the day I downloaded build 6.9.1, I rediscovered the Crimson Editor (now on its version 3.7) and saw how it could open from and save a file to a remote server. So when I tried BigEditor, I wanted to see the same feature functioning at least. It doesn’t. It can log into an FTP server, but not long enough for me to do something with it. 110MB.Com’s FTP service is nasty. It only gives one 60 seconds to log in and show one means business. Once one logs into the server, the message “After 60 seconds of inactivity, your session will be terminated.” I use FileZilla as my FTP client and it gets its job done. With BigEditor, I tried creating an extra folder for images and to upload graphic files into it. I only got as far as the images folder. Everytime I try to upload an image, I get two alerts…

To be fair, I thought it was just due to 110MB’s FTP server having a bad day, so I updated my version of XAMPP and activated its FileZilla server. My object was to see how BigEditor saves to and opens from a remote server, even if it be localhost. After several tries, I gave up. BigEditor was giving me the same error alerts it was giving off connecting to 110MB.

BigEditor is an ambitious project. One must appreciate the developer(s) for undergoing such an endeavor. It is a three-in-one software: a-not-only-HTML-editor (it works great with MySQL data, at least, as far as editing it goes), it is an FTP client (or promises to be so), and it is a comparison tool (make way ExamDiff!). But with the bugs it still has I would rate these features separately in the following way:

A few more words about the Editor component of BigEditor.

It still has no word-wrap. I can understand that MySQL data can require a no-wrap feature (I learned this while editing a large *.SQL file that I was to transfer to another server. Long unbroken lines make it easy to search for data), but when one is working on HTML, and even with Javascript or another scripting code, it helps when an editor can wrap its lines. It is for this reason that editors like AceHTML (even the free version!) or GVIm has that feature.

Second, I like the clipboard feature of BigEditor. The problem with it however is that when one copies anything to the clipboard and then opens a new file in BigEditor, the clipboard data is erased.

Third, while the Search function of BigEditor works fine, it can only search for data from the cursor-point onwards. There is no option for it to continue searching from the beginning of the page when it reaches end of file. Related to this is the fact that there is no Edit –> Select All option from the menu. A Windows user like me would immediately go to the Edit button for “Select” in a copy and paste operation (which I do a lot). In addition, I find that I cannot copy anything to the clipboard from a page in BigEditor when the highlighted selection is the whole page.

Fourth, while I was writing this article for Biblista, BigEditor crashed three times. It gave me the following error

Fifth, while I was writing this article, I had to close the BigEditor once because the Insert Image function stopped working. I had to reopen the application so that I can finish this work.

Again I would like to reiterate my admiration for the one responsible for this project. It is however obvious that the BigEditor is still far from achieving its goals. This three-in-one application is needed by hardcore coders and it will be greatly appreciated if it begins to fulfill its promises.

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