[Garret Wilson]

Setting the default font is impossibly confusing.

Let’s say I want text files to be in Courier New 8pt. So I open EmEditor and by default I have a blank new file of the Text configuration. So I hit Alt+Enter to bring up the Text Properties dialog, go to the Display tab, hit the Font button, and (finally) I can change the font to Courier New 8pt. If only it were that easy.

So I want to open a TSV (tab-separated value text file) in EmEditor. I double-click the file in Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and Windows asks me what application I want to use to open the file. I choose EmEditor. The file opens in EmEditor… in Courier New, 10pt!

OK, maybe EmEditor hasn’t realized that TSV files should be of the Text configuration. So I go to Tools|Associate Configuration, add a *.tsv association, and set it to the Text configuration. And I try again; I reload the TSV file. Same thing: Courier New 10pt.

So I hit Alt+Enter again to bring up the settings for the current configuration (which it says is Text, as it should be), and the font is Courier New 10pt! So I close the TSV file and create a new, blank text file. I hit Alt+Enter again and go to the font… and it shows Courier New 8pt! So wait a second… how can the Text configuration be configured both for Courier New 10pt and Courier New 8pt, depending on which file is loaded?

(As a side note, as marvelous as EmEditor is, this whole business of per-configuration settings is extremely difficult to use. EmEditor should allow a “default configuration” or “base configuration” settings, and then each of the file types could override only those properties that they need to. So if I wanted to change the default font to Courier New 8pt, I would go into the “default configuration” and set the font to Courier New 8pt. Done! That’s all I would need to do. If a particular configuration wants to override that setting, it could. This is how it’s done in Eclipse. This is how it’s done in Notepad++. How it’s done in EmEditor fries my brain, and I’m tired of changing the font each time I open a different file.)

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