The Dink Network

This was the first DinkC editor I downloaded, and I have stuck with it since. It is a rather basic editor, but has some pretty powerful and useful functions.

The buttons (a rather small amount of five) are all Dink-styled icons. The Open is a chest, and the Save icon is, yes you guessed it, a savebot. It takes a little while to get used to, but if you hover over them, it will tell you what each does.

Good points:
One the great things about this program is the error checking ability. When you click the wizard button (or ctrl+Q), it comes up with a list of errors down the bottom, including the line it occurs in. Double clicking the error will bring you to the line so you don't have to hunt around. This compensates reasonably well for not showing the number for each line down the side. It will look for unclosed brackets and lack of semi-colons and report in which line it occurs.

It also can pick up errors in functions, such as if you misspell a function, or leave out an element, such as an " mark.
eg. it will find an error in: say_stop("Hello, 1); for not having the closing " mark.

However, the checker will pick up some errors that aren't actually errors, such as global variables (it assumes all non-standard variables are internal). eg you'll get "Line#10 - Warning: The variable "&banana" wasn't declared in this script" even if you have declared "&banana" in main.c.

The DinkC Reference button is also very handy. One click on the magic scroll icon and it will open up the DinkC reference help file, (another extremely useful file that helped me alot).

When you open the brackets of a function, it will display up the top a function reference, telling you what that particular function should look like. So if you just can't remember exactly how a function should go, this is rather useful.

One of my favourite features of DinkC Editor is the auto-tabbing function, which will automatically tab to the position of the tab on the previous line, eliminating the need for endless spacing or tabbing.
eg:
<tab> say_stop("Hey, pressing enter after this line...", 1); <enter>
<auto-tab> say_stop("...will make the cursor go to the same spot!", 1); <yay>

Not-so-good points:
There are a few bad points though. There is only the ability to undo once, so watch out! I have been caught out in this on the odd occasion, and not having more than one undo is very frustrating. If there ever is an updated version, multiple undos is an essential addition.

Being able to open in tabs (like notepad plus) would also be a handy feature, as could be specific-text colours (for functions, text, numbers, comments etc.). But DinkC Editor is a basic one, just having the option to tile or cascade windows or change font and colour generically. I've also found it's possible to open multiple copies of the same file, which if you don't look under the window option to check may cause you some problems.

I have had the occasional bug with the Find&Replace function, but only when using non-alphabet characters, such as numbers or # or `. There is also no 'whole word' option with this, so if you choose Replace All, it will replace 'bar' with 'car' but will also turn 'barrel' into 'carrel'. It does the same with numbers (changing 2 into 4 will also change 250 into 450), so this is a thing to watch out for.

In summary:
Good:
- Error checking
- DinkC Reference button which opens the help file
- Function reference (when you open brackets of a function)
- Auto-tab function

Not-so-good:
- Only one undo function!
- Find&Replace can stuff up with non-alphabet characters, no 'whole word' option
- No tabbed windows, only tiling or cascading

I'll give this an 8.0. Even though it's basic, it still has enough features to be a good little DinkC editor.