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« Last post by mouser on April 24, 2005, 06:15 PM »
I've updated the review to indicate that EditPlus has a column mode.
to me column mode is a really important feature and it's presence, or lack of, separates the top tier editors from the rest, so i apologize for missing it. it is well hidden though.
EditPlus is indeed a nice editor.
In a way it's hard to do a review like this, focusing on a "best", when you have some very close contenders - the winner gets all the attention while the others get barely a mention. i did try this time to be really clear about the fact that differences were not that great, and tried to list most of the serious text editors i could find, to give them some exposure.
For some reviews, like website watcher, it's easy to pick a clearly best app. for something like text editor, it's much much harder, and personal tastes or small featureset differences could easily sway a particular person to prefer one over the other. On the other hand, i still think there is value in choosing one app to focus on and making a recommendation in favor of it.
But perhaps in cases where things are so tight, we should consider some kind of symbol to indicate when an alternative program should really be considered. It's a catch-22 really, if i only list the top 3 alternative apps, people get sad that their favorite app isn't listed. But if i list a large number of alternatives, then it's hard to separate the 2nd best from the wanne bes.
That's why for text editor i tried to list for each one it's implementation of those features i consider most important, in hopes that it would help people to more quickly filter out candidates.
The other thing is that these reviews/awards can sometimes be more about the general subject of task then the app. 90% of the text editor review could really be viewed as "Text Editors: What They Do and What Features To Look For", and written in a way that was agnostic about the actual tool; many of the features that are talked about in the center of the review are in fact features shared by most editors.. and then only at the end recommending UltraEdit.
It may be something to think about whether the weekly reviews wouldn't be better suited if they were done more like guides, with a final recommendation of best app, but not so focused on the winner throughout.. Although it does make it a little harder to discuss feature sets in general.
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