Product Reviews
Boxer 9.0
This text editor has been around for quite a long time - I can remember
using it way back in its DOS incarnation (and they even had -- and still
have! -- an extended DOS version). Now it's a Windows text editor and
a darned good one.
I am especially taken with Boxer's nice little touches when it comes
to HTML editing. For example, you can open a file from an FTP site and
then forget about the FTP part; saves just do the right thing. The spell-checker
can ignore HTML tags, but the parser color-codes them nicely. If you hover
your mouse over a color hex value, you'll get a tiny popup hint window
showing the specified color. There's a template set (a set of canned text
strings) just for inserting HTML tags.
Boxer also excels at basic text editing operations. Nice functions include
columnar support, swapping lines, case manipulation, swapping words, duplicate
line, and multiple clipboard support. And that's just a random selection.
Also notable is the configurability; there are many options you can tweak
to make Boxer work the way you want (although the out of the box defaults
are pretty good themselves).
If you're looking for something midway between a freeware editor with
few functions and a full-blown IDE, Boxer might be just the tool you were
after.
[This review originally appeared in
About the Author
Mike Gunderloy, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, is a former MCP columnist and the author of numerous development books.