Tom Wilczak has advice for using ant with textpad:
First get all your environment variables set--if you are able to run Ant from the command line you should be fine. Select Configure -> Preferences then highlight Tools Click the add button, and select DOS command Enter "Ant -find build.xml " in the Command field Click the apply button, then highlight ant Make sure that the 'capture output' and 'save documents first' options are selected. You may also want to select 'Prompt for parameters', as this will allow you to run the other ant targets besides the default project build (ie: Ant clean, ant test, etc.) Enter the following in the 'Regular Expression to Match Output' field: "^[ \t]+\[javac\] \([A-Za-z]:[^:]+\):\([0-9]+\):" Set the File Register to 1, and the Line Register to 2 To run Ant, your build.xml file should be placed in your project home directory (the parent directory of your src or code directory) or any grandparent directory above your project home directory. It is also configured to jump to the offending file and line when you get compiler errors. You can also configure the tools to run from your choice of keyboard shortcuts by selecting the Keyboard option in the preferences box, and selecting tools. The rest should be self explanatory.