i use textpad religiously.

i used to be a fan of homesite and editpad, but frankly, when you've got used to regular expression search and replace in textpad, can compare files perfectly (great for upgrades to code), well the others are left out of the equation.

the biggest work i've ever done in textpad was to open a 95,000 line text file and perform a regex search to find all e-mail addresses (some 26,000) and then re-format the whole file to insert into a majordomo list. it took approx 30 seconds end to end (you can raise textpads CPU priority, and it does work properly).

you sound like you already have the best tool, now you just need to play with it a while and learn all of it's features.

just to underline though, i work for BT and currently write in PHP, Perl, TCL, Vignette, ASP, C++, Oracle PL/SQL and other gibberish. Textpad does all of these and can even compile your java (just put javac in the run command at the top, and make it a keyboard shortcut).

as i've always found, the choice is usually between friendliness and power. textpad is just raw power.

cheers

david k