Hints and tips working in notepad

Hey, I don’t know if it’s really stupid to give these hints, but perhaps they can help you. (they could have helped me)

First off, I had no experience working in notepad before trying to make my own game. However, I have found two things that might save you some time.

Since I’m not a native English speaker / writer I tend to write everything in word first, and than copy it to notepad. Of course, the quotation marks ( " and ’ ) will be changed in a ? when you try to play the game if you don’t chance them in notepad. The quickest way to do so I think is:

First select and copy a unrecognized quotation marks (use ctrl c). Then use ctrl f to search and past with ctrl v.
It will only show the quotation marks of the type you selected. When I work on my laptop I can’t really see the difference between a recognized and an unrecognized quotation mark so it’s a good way to work I think.

The most horrible discovery I made earlier today. By simply pressing ctrl g you can jump to a line number. Which, if you use the randomtest and quicktest can save you A LOT OF TIME.

Ok, that is all. Hope it can help someone. And if someone got good tips, please share them.

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Did you know you can set Word so that it doesn’t automatically use those curly quote marks? How? I’ve no idea if this works because I don’t currently have a copy of Word on my computer. :frowning: But https://support.office.com/en-ca/article/Change-curly-quotes-to-straight-quotes-and-vice-versa-017963a0-bc5f-486b-9c9d-0ec511a8fb8f

I recommend the free program Notepad++ for coding in ChoiceScript (available here.). It doesn’t do automatic quote fixing or any of the other annoying things you might get from Microsoft Word. Among other features, it allows you to select whole chunks of code and indent or de-indent them by hitting Tab, and @CJW helpfully created a syntax highlighter for it in this thread.

(I also use Notepad++ for Lua and C. It’s really useful!)

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Thanks you two. Downloaded the Notepad++ and already found a few mistakes in my spacing.

So I think the prgram should help quite a bit. (I’m glad I made this thread :smile: )

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I love notepad++ SO much better than normal notepad. It has spell check which is awesome!

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My favorite Notepad++ features lately: word count (View -> Summary) and “find all in document”.

That doesn’t do you much good if you’re wanting a word count of the game you’re writing minus the code.

Oh yeah I do love word count as well…but I’m not sure how to really know what words are without code…so I always just take out about 10% words (depending on game) in my mind and have an about.

There’s also a small plugin for the language (not sure when it was last updated, so a few commands might be missing). Makes distinguishing code at a glance so much easier. http://choicescriptdev.wikia.com/wiki/Notepad%2B%2B_Syntax_Highlighter