Reading the status bar in Jotter by Zaweba
Line and column, selection, character and line counts, zoom, CRLF or LF and the file's encoding: what each part of Jotter by Zaweba's status bar tells you.
The strip along the bottom of Jotter by Zaweba is easy to ignore, and most of the time you can. But it answers a surprising number of small questions about the text in front of you, without opening a single dialog: where the cursor is, how much you have selected, how long the note is, how far you have zoomed, and what kind of line endings and encoding the file uses.
It updates as you type and as you move the cursor, so it always describes the tab you are looking at, right now.
Position: line and column
The first thing it shows is the line and column of the cursor. Line numbers are the language of error messages: a program that complains about a problem on line 212 of a settings file is telling you exactly where to look. Click into the file, watch the line number, and move until you are there. The column number helps when a message names a column too, or when you need text to start at a certain position.
With word wrap on, the line reported is still the real line in the file, not the line as it appears on screen. That makes the status bar a handy test of whether a long piece of text is one line or several.
Selection and counts
The status bar shows the selection and the number of characters and lines in the text. That covers a lot of everyday checks. Is this message within a character limit? How many entries are in this list, one per line? How long is the paragraph I just selected? Select it and read the answer at the bottom of the window.
Since the counts update as you type, you can write to a length by watching the number, which suits short descriptions, product titles and anything else with a limit.
Zoom
The current zoom level appears here too. Zoom runs from 50% to 400% with Ctrl and the mouse wheel, Ctrl+Plus and Ctrl+Minus, and Ctrl+0 resets to 100%. If text suddenly looks bigger or smaller than you expected, the status bar tells you it is zoom rather than anything in the file.
Line endings: CRLF or LF
Text files end their lines in one of two ways. Windows traditionally uses CRLF, two characters; Unix, Linux and macOS use LF, one character. Most of the time you'd never know, but some tools and servers care. The status bar shows which one the current tab uses.
Jotter keeps each file's line endings as they were when it saves, so a Unix file you edit on Windows goes back as a Unix file. The status bar is how you confirm what you are dealing with before you send a file on.
Encoding
The last piece is the encoding: UTF-8, UTF-8 with a BOM, UTF-16 or ANSI. Encoding decides how characters beyond plain English letters are stored, and a wrong guess shows up as odd symbols in place of accents or quotation marks. Jotter keeps the encoding a file had when it saves, with one sensible exception: an ANSI file that gains characters ANSI cannot hold is saved as UTF-8 so nothing is lost. If you are curious why a file has changed encoding, that is the reason, and the status bar will show it.
Putting it to use
A good habit when you open a file someone else made is to look down at the status bar once. In a second you know its encoding, its line endings and how big it is. When you are writing, the counts and position tell you where you are without breaking off. None of it gets in the way, which is how Jotter by Zaweba likes things.
