ok.. i tried TextPad. this is my personal oppinion:
textpad is a solid editor who have pretty much embedded all the commands ultraedit have. however, the only thing that bothered me alot was the key command association.
1. the Find option was associated with Refresh. also the Find command didnt search automatically from the top of the file. (however, there is an option that you can configure the key associations, but not from the top of the file. this is probably the most important option for us, the people at vb.org, to be able to find easy a code segment)
2. highlighting the PHP code was associated with text files, not C++, as usual.
3. scrolling is extremly slow in large files/screens (my finger started to hurt on the wheel

)
4. compare files is poor in details.
5. replace in files not available as function.
6. complex options configuration (i got lost in the options

)
7. code indicator bar not available (the yellow highlight bar you see in the screenshot).
overall, the program is great.

i'm just doing the difficult guy....