Using the Quick Editor

Quick Editor is one of the most convenient tools of AB Commander that may speed up your work with text files considerably. You can use it to quickly view and edit any text file, not necessarily associated with any particular application. This command is especially useful when working with simple text files (such as the files created with Windows Notepad) that contain no formatting information.

To use this command, simply select the text file in question in one of the panels, and choose the Quick Edit command from the Tools menu (or press the Ctrl+Q key combination), and the file will be opened with the Quick Editor for you.

AB Commander includes a full-featured internal Quick Editor that can be used as a complete Notepad replacement within AB Commander. The internal Quick Editor can be used to edit the regular ASCII text files, as well as the Unix text files. On the NT-based versions of Windows (such as Windows 2000, XP) it can also be used to edit Unicode files, including those encoded in the UTF-8 format. The binary files can be viewed with the internal Quick Editor, too, although editing them would be disabled.

You can also set up your favorite text processor as the external Quick Editor (by default, Window Notepad is set up as the external Quick Editor). If you prefer the external Quick Editor, you can use the Quick Edit page of the Options window to set it up as the preferred Quick Editor. The preferred Quick Editor is accessible through the toolbar, menu, and the Ctrl+Q shortcut keys. The other text processor (the alternative one) would still be accessible via the Ctrl+Shift+Q key combination.

CAUTION: Quick Edit is a powerful command that must be used with care. If you use Quick Editor to modify binary files, or files that contain not only text but also formatting information, you can corrupt the files. For example, if you want to change something in a Microsoft Word document (normally, a file name that ends with the .doc extension), open it with Word, not with Quick Editor, to preserve the formatting of the document. (If you simply want to view the raw contents of a Word document, then Quick Editor can be used.) In general, don't use the Quick Editor to modify non-text files, unless you are sure of what you are doing. When in doubt, make a backup copy of a file before modifying it!