Notepad annoyance

[Greep]

So I've been designing a sort of rogue-like video game, and my program takes an ascii "map" and turns into a dungeon. Like

WWW
W W
WWW

Is essentially a wall with a one tile hole in the middle. Now as you can see, if I want to actually visualize said dungeon correctly while designing it, I need to use notepad or something similar where all the characters have exactly the same height and width.

My problem is I start with a room with all Ws around the dimensions I need and just a bunch of spaces in the middle. If I want to make a wall somewhere in the middle, it unfortunately shifts everything to the right after it. Basically what I need is an "insert" key but notepad apparently doesn't use that like word does. So is there anything that makes text files that I can use something like insert, or does anyone have a good idea of some alternative that would let me do this?

[celtois]

If you aren't scared of a little bit of rough and dirty in setting it up, gedit's windows build should do exactly what you need, you can switch between overwrite and insert using the insert key on your keyboard. http://projects.gnome.org/gedit/

Mind you I run the linux version so I can't promise you it will work the same as it does for me.

I'm kinda in love with this program it's basically notepad with a lot more features and open source, meaning I can use it to write documents and actually have them spell checked, and it even supports some basic coding syntax stuff.

[Anxe]

copy and paste into word and then copy and paste back into notepad?

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

Any program will work if you use a fixed-width font. The Courier font family, which you should have on your machine by default, is probably the go-to for something like this, but there are numerous other fixed-width fonts out there.

Here's a site with a few fixed-width font suggestions if you want something fancier than Courier.

[Greep]

Ah, tried gedit, and it works great :)

Also tried courier on word, which would be nice but even setting the linespacing to the lowest, .5, made the spacing between lines too large for me to figure out what the dungeon would look like.

[celtois]

Glad to hear gedit works great for you. It's always great to see some support for the open source alternatives that I love. Even better to see peoples problems fixed.

(I hope you mean it works for this project anyways. )

[Greep]

Yeah, that's what I meant :) It looks pretty handy in general, tho.

[celtois]

Oh yeah gedit is pretty sweet if you start learning all the crazy stuffy you can do with it. =D, you can have documents calling other documents, and all sorts of really cool stuff, such as file chaining. At least I'm pretty sure it's the one I'm thinking of for doing all that cool jazz, I tend to have too many handy little programs kicking around to keep track of them all.

Mind you it is a nice sensible text editor. Keeps things simple enough for me to just type since most of the time that's all I need.

I'm glad to hear everything worked out for you! Good luck with your game.

[factotum]

Originally Posted by Greep

Also tried courier on word, which would be nice but even setting the linespacing to the lowest, .5, made the spacing between lines too large for me to figure out what the dungeon would look like.

You can turn off the spacing between paragraphs entirely--it'll be that that's causing your issue, I bet, since you'll presumably have a carriage return at the end of every line.

Mind you, I tend to use Excel if I'm making simple maps anyway...

[Phishfood]

Originally Posted by factotum

You can turn off the spacing between paragraphs entirely--it'll be that that's causing your issue, I bet, since you'll presumably have a carriage return at the end of every line.

Mind you, I tend to use Excel if I'm making simple maps anyway...

That might be a much better idea, excel saved as a CSV or something. Then you can find/replace out the , if you need to.