Celestia Forums

Hello,

Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but I've searched and haven't seen it answered explicitely or seen any implicit hints.. What is the program that's used to read the .ssc files? Opening these with Notepad gives a messy layout, no visible formating. There's no carriage returns anywhere. The help files I've found in the addons are just as garbled, so I'm guessing there's some standard text editor other than Notepad that everyone's agreed on.. ?

Thanks.

Sputnik wrote:Hello,

Pardon me if this is a stupid question, but I've searched and haven't seen it answered explicitely or seen any implicit hints.. What is the program that's used to read the .ssc files? Opening these with Notepad gives a messy layout, no visible formating. There's no carriage returns anywhere. The help files I've found in the addons are just as garbled, so I'm guessing there's some standard text editor other than Notepad that everyone's agreed on.. ?

Thanks.

The ssc files are human readable configuration files for Celestia. So Celesltia reads them upon startup. For editing .ssc files you should use an editor --not as stupid as notepad--.

Celestia being multi-platform software (Windows, MAC OS, Linux), its configuration files do not always satisfy the Windows line-ending syntax. The latter differs for the three most popular operating systems! Notepad is a particularly simplistic piece of Windows software, entirely unable to cope with text files from different operating systems. What editor is best to use instead, depends on many things, that depend a lot on what you want to do.

For Windows, I use notepad++, for example.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/de/site.htm

notepad++ is free and VERY good. Note: it has very little to do with notepad

When I develop in Linux, I use Kate (KDE).

Fridger
.

I usually use WordPad which comes with windows and has never given me much problems.

For what it's worth, the Windows editor WordPad will translate non-Windows text files so they have <cr><lf> line terminators.

Thank you!

Yes I was about to mention WordPad, but really other editors like notepad++ can do soooooooooo much more, notably for programming. They have a very good syntax highlighting engine, for example.

But as I said, it all depends what people want to do with these editors.

Fridger

Notepad should be good enough for viewing and editing ssc files... I use textedit on mac.

bh wrote:Notepad should be good enough for viewing and editing ssc files... I use textedit on mac.

bh,

you might have overread that the problem is that some Celestia .ssc files have UNIX/MAC-OS line endings. This means that for Windows the file looks like a huge ONE-line thing. Notepad is a stupid piece of Windows software that CANNOT deal with MAC-OS, Linux line endings.

Definitely!

WordPad and most other, more up-to-date editors can.

Fridger

Ahh... it's been a while since I was on win... things have moved on it seems!

Just so's you are aware of it...
I use Notepad2 - light-weight Scintilla-based text editor for Windows - on
my Vista system, and it is completely compatible with Celestia's files and peculiarities.
This is also another freeware program. I believe that it is open-source too,
but I could be wrong about that. The source is freely available though.

Thanks, Brain-Dead