My MUST-HAVE text editing app

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crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
I am proud to present Need To Write!
It's a text editor unlimited by file sizes and offers a lot of customization and power tools
Completely FREE version can be downloaded here!

576108_4343568954156_950574931_n.jpg


Difference between Paid and Free version is mainly in the poweruser options.
Paid version mainly adds lotsa poweruser options ;D
1) Remembers up to 9999 undo/redo operations
2) Control over the End-Of-Line characters (Apple, Unix and Windows tend to handle different End-Of-Line differently when doing plain text editing)
3) Allows user to specify buffer size
4) Allows custom fonts and background images
5) Allows user to customize 6 extra Themes in addition to the built-in 3 Themes.
6) Allows toggling of word wrap
7) Continuous Text to Speech.
8) Automatic backup of multiple files to user specified locations on SD card

Free version:
1) Remembers just 1 undo/redo operation, plus 1 reset buffer
2) Defaults to Android EOL handling
4) Fixed 10000 buffer size
5) Custom fonts and backgrounds disabled. You can still paint over the existing 3 themes with a solid color though, just adjust your Opacity bar in your themes dialog.
6) Customization of 3 built in Themes.
7) Always wordwrap
8) Text to Speech reads single paragraphs only.
9) Automatic backup of 1 file to user specified location on SD card

Version 1.71 features:
1) A File List, which works like a Bookshelf/Task_list/Recent_files hybrid management system. So basically, you can use it as a Task list, text bookreader, and text file editor as well.

2) Edit mode with unlimited file size, and tracking system to resume your reading/editing progress.

3) HTML mode! Supports non html files as well.

4) Text to Speech! I'm gonna use it to listening to ebooks when my eyes are tired :)

5) GoTo, Search, Replace, Cut, Copy, and Paste

6) Multiple Undo and Redo with undo history up to 9999(for the full version). Also comes with a sliding bar to easily rewind and fast forward the changes you made.

7) Themes! Customizable display; you can specify your own background images, custom fonts, background and font colors, line spacing, indents etc.

8) Landscape mode

9) EditText view with inertia scrolling, and yet no irritating problems of the view rectangle not being called to show your cursor, nor the rectangle jumping all over the place when you try to place your cursor far away.

10) Toggleable word wrap and autocapitalization (if supported by keyboard app)

11) Specify what End-Of-Line chars for saving your files with.

12) Tons of encoding options from ISO, windows 125_, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc.

13) Share your files or just specific lines of selected text via email, bluetooth etc.

14) Automatic backup of files to user specified locations on SD card

15) HTML mode to easily switch between plain text and HTML view

If you like what you see, download now!
 
Last edited:

LuffyPSP

Senior Member
Aug 1, 2010
2,276
165
nice, gonna try it after i re-flashed my phone today.

hope the html view is up soon. gotta love it!
 

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
Latest version 1.3 is up!
Major changes are:
- Bookshelf/memo_list/recent_files hybrid system. Basically, you can use it as a memo list, bookreader, and text file editor.
- Fixed most of the pesky question marks by using windows-1252 as the default encoding.
- Added a lot of encoding options from ISO, windows 125_, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
- Themes! Customizable themes, and you can specify your own background images (Paid version only).
- Share your files via email/bluetooth etc.
- Built in file browser
- No more popup nag box! :s
 

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
New version 1.35!
New features:
1) Toggleable word wrap
2) Specify which type of End-Of-Line chars to use when saving files, '\r', '\n', or '\r'+'\n'
3) Improved Find/Replace and GoTo function. Background no longer dims.
4) Stability fixes, some quite important ones. Make sure you update if you haven't yet!
 
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crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
New version 1.40!
NTW now talks! Comes with ability to adjust pitch, speech rate, and supported languages.
But be warned, I think Android's Text to Speech is a bit buggy, so the voice doesn't really respond consistently to my controls for pitch and speech rate.

Edit: I found out it does respond consistently, but I have to be patient and wait for the next sentence to play naturally, instead of pressing stop and play for instant replay :eek:
 
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crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
Ok, I think I've solved the crashing problem some of you may be experiencing. Hopefully anyway......:(
v1.42
- Patches NTW crashing due to your phone's Text to Speech settings or lack of TTS.
- More encodings: ISO-2022 for JP, KR & CN. KOI-8R for russian.
 

woaloo

Retired Forum Moderator
Jun 23, 2006
457
48
Fairphone
Samsung Galaxy S10e
Great great great app Man !!!

It's exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks a lot, and long life to NTW.

Do you plan any multi language option ? If so, I could translate it in French !

I have also few suggestions. ;-)

-It would be great to have the setting menu directly in the first page like other app.
-The preview under the text file is not necessary. It takes a lot of place. (it could only be an option)
-It could be nice to have a choice to select default directory.
-It's could be also an option to view or not last opened files


I have a little trouble. When I select a recent file from the list, I have this message:
<<Bug. Try Forget file then reopen again>>...but everything seems to be fine. And if I reopen, I have the same message.

Thanks for your answers.
 
Last edited:

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
Hi, its great to have more feedback from NTW users!
Thanks for your offer to translate. Currently I am not planning any multi-language option since the number of NTW users is still really small :'-(, plus I really have no idea how to go about implementing multi-language menus and popups elegantly, heheheh...

-It would be great to have the setting menu directly in the first page like other app.
I'm not sure what you mean... Are you talking about a row of options under the main editing window?

-The preview under the text file is not necessary. It takes a lot of place. (it could only be an option)
-It could be nice to have a choice to select default directory.

Yup, certainly doable. I'll try to implement them in the next version

-It's could be also an option to view or not last opened files
Do you mean to open the last opened file automatically simply by opening the NTW icon?
If so, I think I can implement that as well in the next version.

However, I will be very busy for the next 2 weeks in a horrible place called Clementi Camp, with no basic modern amenities, not even internet, sob sob sob :'-( , so any updates will have to be in April.

In the meantime, you can try creating a shortcut to your "default folder" on your home screen, then open your desired file with NTW directly from the folder.

About the bug you encountered, I have not managed to trigger it myself even though I coded the check for the trigger and I am using Galaxy S myself. It occurs due to issues when calculating the file percentage you are currently viewing. I would recommend that you first try a long press in the main file list menu to forget the file, then reopen it. If you still get the same message, then it would be best to avoid using GoTo, but otherwise, you should be able to continue your editing normally.
I will look into it when I'm back to civilization.
 
Last edited:

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
Just got out of Clementi camp! Thanks for your compliments and feedback! :')

The free version disables the ability to specify End-Of-Line chars, word wrap, font type, background textures, and buffer size (called "Chunk size" within NTW's controls). Text to Speech is also handicapped to single lines in the free version. The full version also allows up to 6 extra custom themes to be created.

I have no time to do any serious programming as I have to return to Clementi camp tomorrow, so any version updates you have suggested by will have to wait til next week earliest.
 

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
Just want to say this before I explode.

Multiple undo/redo at last!
In fact, there's even a sliding bar for you to easily rewind or fast forward all your changes.

It'll be available in the Android market within the next few hours!

Trial version gets a measly undo history of 1, just enough for "****! I accidentally deleted the whole paragraph!" situations.
Paid version gets undo history of 9999. In theory, I could make the history even longer, since the undo history only stores the specific characters that were changed/added, but if the user were to do a lot of pasting/deleting of long text segments, then the undo history may occupy the phone memory pretty fast, so lets not risk it.
 
Last edited:

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
Heheheheh!!! Always wanted to implement multiple undo/redo, but only recently figured out how to do so efficiently :D :D :D

v1.45
- Multiple undo/redo! Undo History bar allows easy rewinding or fast forwarding of your changes, maxed at 9999 steps.
"Reset chunk" replaces the original Undo/Redo menu option.
Clicking of "Reset chunk" is recorded in Undo history.
Note: Free version has Undo history of only 1 in addition to "Reset chunk".

- Improved File Browser

- Streamlined File List interface.
Long press to view the preview, file properties, "Forget" and "Share" options.
 

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
NTW v1.47 is out!
Basically, this update makes the search, goTo, and undo/redo operations much easier than before. It also makes much better use of the space at the top which was previously just showing the filename and current %.

- Implemented fast scroll thumbs for browser and NTW shelf .
- Icon toolbar for convenient undo/redo, goTo, search, load next/prev chunk. Long click of undo/redo buttons pop up the undo history bar. Click the % display to shwo the goTo dialog.
- Improved goTo function.
 

crandf

Senior Member
Nov 28, 2008
158
22
market.android.com
NTW v1.48 is out!

- Fast scroll thumb for the main text box! (Built from scratch, whew! The behavior of ListView's fast scroll thumb was really tough to emulate properly :eek:)

- Progress bar above icon bar to show you where is your currently loaded chunk.

- Search backwards in addition to searching forwards. Plus some tweaks to search behavior
 

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  • 4
    I am proud to present Need To Write!
    It's a text editor unlimited by file sizes and offers a lot of customization and power tools
    Completely FREE version can be downloaded here!

    576108_4343568954156_950574931_n.jpg


    Difference between Paid and Free version is mainly in the poweruser options.
    Paid version mainly adds lotsa poweruser options ;D
    1) Remembers up to 9999 undo/redo operations
    2) Control over the End-Of-Line characters (Apple, Unix and Windows tend to handle different End-Of-Line differently when doing plain text editing)
    3) Allows user to specify buffer size
    4) Allows custom fonts and background images
    5) Allows user to customize 6 extra Themes in addition to the built-in 3 Themes.
    6) Allows toggling of word wrap
    7) Continuous Text to Speech.
    8) Automatic backup of multiple files to user specified locations on SD card

    Free version:
    1) Remembers just 1 undo/redo operation, plus 1 reset buffer
    2) Defaults to Android EOL handling
    4) Fixed 10000 buffer size
    5) Custom fonts and backgrounds disabled. You can still paint over the existing 3 themes with a solid color though, just adjust your Opacity bar in your themes dialog.
    6) Customization of 3 built in Themes.
    7) Always wordwrap
    8) Text to Speech reads single paragraphs only.
    9) Automatic backup of 1 file to user specified location on SD card

    Version 1.71 features:
    1) A File List, which works like a Bookshelf/Task_list/Recent_files hybrid management system. So basically, you can use it as a Task list, text bookreader, and text file editor as well.

    2) Edit mode with unlimited file size, and tracking system to resume your reading/editing progress.

    3) HTML mode! Supports non html files as well.

    4) Text to Speech! I'm gonna use it to listening to ebooks when my eyes are tired :)

    5) GoTo, Search, Replace, Cut, Copy, and Paste

    6) Multiple Undo and Redo with undo history up to 9999(for the full version). Also comes with a sliding bar to easily rewind and fast forward the changes you made.

    7) Themes! Customizable display; you can specify your own background images, custom fonts, background and font colors, line spacing, indents etc.

    8) Landscape mode

    9) EditText view with inertia scrolling, and yet no irritating problems of the view rectangle not being called to show your cursor, nor the rectangle jumping all over the place when you try to place your cursor far away.

    10) Toggleable word wrap and autocapitalization (if supported by keyboard app)

    11) Specify what End-Of-Line chars for saving your files with.

    12) Tons of encoding options from ISO, windows 125_, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc.

    13) Share your files or just specific lines of selected text via email, bluetooth etc.

    14) Automatic backup of files to user specified locations on SD card

    15) HTML mode to easily switch between plain text and HTML view

    If you like what you see, download now!
    2
    Latest version 1.3 is up!
    Major changes are:
    - Bookshelf/memo_list/recent_files hybrid system. Basically, you can use it as a memo list, bookreader, and text file editor.
    - Fixed most of the pesky question marks by using windows-1252 as the default encoding.
    - Added a lot of encoding options from ISO, windows 125_, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.
    - Themes! Customizable themes, and you can specify your own background images (Paid version only).
    - Share your files via email/bluetooth etc.
    - Built in file browser
    - No more popup nag box! :s
    1
    New version 1.35!
    New features:
    1) Toggleable word wrap
    2) Specify which type of End-Of-Line chars to use when saving files, '\r', '\n', or '\r'+'\n'
    3) Improved Find/Replace and GoTo function. Background no longer dims.
    4) Stability fixes, some quite important ones. Make sure you update if you haven't yet!
    1
    New version 1.40!
    NTW now talks! Comes with ability to adjust pitch, speech rate, and supported languages.
    But be warned, I think Android's Text to Speech is a bit buggy, so the voice doesn't really respond consistently to my controls for pitch and speech rate.

    Edit: I found out it does respond consistently, but I have to be patient and wait for the next sentence to play naturally, instead of pressing stop and play for instant replay :eek:
    1
    v1.41 is out. It only patches NTW crashing due to certain Text to Speech settings. Download if you encounter this crashing.