First of all, unless the poster of a comment is Helios (Stephen) or ... I'm blanking on the other official account (I think Keith is bbadmin) it's just another person commenting on it, thus no official weight is given to their comments.
People here tend to take their editor very seriously. I know I laughed quite loudly and unprofessionally
![Wink ;)](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
in a meeting with a new boss about standards where he said UltraEdit (ick) will be the office standard. That'd be akin to asking me to use Emacs in a unix environment. I'm trying to think what the enhancement they rolled out in TP, I think it was current line highlighting. IIRC, you had to have something set initially and it couldn't be the same as the background. Maybe a week went by before they rolled out the next revision which allowed it to be disabled completely. When you work with a tool 6-10 hours a day, you don't want changes to the core functionality which I think is what lionelb was trying to get across.
Personally, I don't really know if I'm sold on the idea as it's been explained thus far, but perhaps I could be if I investigated Jan Paul's tool and better understood how it would affect and enhance TextPad.
As it stands, if you feel there is room for improvement to TextPad, feel free to create a five-option poll in this forum (Enhancement Suggestions) and then the masses will vote on it. That's the standard way for users to users to vote and suggest features they'd like seen implemented in TextPad. You can look at other polls to see what the standard poll responses are. Go ahead and use that format otherwise, it won't show up in Jeffy's updated rank listings.
Another option that I've employed and I shudder to suggest it, is MS Access. Our database specialists clean data for a living and that's their primary tool. I can't say I care for it much as a database tool (
mutters about stupid joining syntax) but it avoids the 65k line limitation that Excel has and OpenOffice, bless their hearts, implemented as well. That or you can always go the pleasingly painful route of writing an awk or perl/python script to process files.