how to rename file to .htaccess on XP

I know this thread was about changing the extension of ht.access to .htaccess but if you are dev/designing on XP you should download Notepad++ or some other text editor. Native Windows Notepad and Wordpad can do funky things to your text. On my XP box I use e-TextEditor but Notepad++ or jEdit are both pretty good for such work.

Back when I had Windows, I used Crimson Edit. It had a lot of good features, like the ability to do search-and-replace across multiple files, line numbers, color syntax highlighting and a bunch of other goodies.

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

UltraEdit is great too, plus their website is built with MODx.

Quote from: sottwell at Aug 30, 2008, 06:30 AM

Probably better to copy it (does XP have an equivalent of the cp command?) rather than renaming it, so you’ll still have the ht.access file to edit easily if necessary. That’s what I always do on my *nix variant servers (darwin, linux, and solaris).

Copying would be done by using "copy ht.access .htaccess"

Quote from: markg at Aug 30, 2008, 02:31 AM

Bob, just for my own curiosity, what file type do you select in the drop down box?

As I’m looking at it in XP, it forces the .txt extension on you anyway, even if you do call it.htaccess.

That’s why I always end up doing it in Notepad.

It forces the .txt file-type on me too, but for some reason it saves the file with no .txt extension.

Rename it in filezilla in the client side window, throw it onto the web-server. Never had a problem editing it then in notepad and copying it up to the server.

Windows has always had a problem using files that only have a file extension and no file name. That’s basically what a .htaccess file is to Windows. So, yeah, if you upload the file to the server and then rename it there then that’s the best way to go. However, if you need to use htaccess files on a Windows server running Apache then the best bet would be to configure Apache to use a different name for the htaccess files. Doesn’t have to be .htaccess. Could be ht.access.