For example, Boxer goes head-to-head with UltraEdit, PowerEdit and Borland's industry-leading CodeWright programming editor by offering a built-in calculator which works extremely well. It's actually a powerful scientific calculator which in my opinion amounts to a full extra utility built into the program for free. Boxer also contains recognition filters for dozens of programming languages (color syntax highlighting for HTML, Java, Perl, VBScript, etc.). The program offers its own Calendar utility too, from which you can choose and insert dates in long or short formats at any point in your document. It's all very handy and thoughtful. At the other end of the spectrum, editorial and story writers will appreciate Boxer's quick responses and formatting tools such as trailing space removal, hyphenation, ellipsis and quote controls, and other features demanded by writers and editors.

The keystroke logger is another interesting and useful inclusion which basically lets you record anything and everything you type. If you've ever struggled to recreate some complex bit of typing and keyboard commands in order to design a macro, you'll love the keylogger. Look through the keylog file and simply copy and paste the relevant code into the Boxer macro editor. It's really a huge timesaver which provides great value to writers, programmers and anyone else who makes extensive use of a text editor.

Cons: Boxer is a good tool for editors, writers and programmers of all kinds, but I have a bit of a quarrel with the way it formats inserted text. What happens is that if the text you paste or type/insert is longer than the current line, it doesn't wrap to the next line until the next line end occurs as you continue typing from the end of whatever was inserted or pasted, after which everything is automatically wrapped properly. It's visually distracting for writers, less so for programmers and other text editor users who are constantly using the Return key to format, adjust or add lines. The reformat operation (shortcut: Ctrl+F10) begins on the current line and includes all lines to the end of the current paragraph. Unfortunately for writers (programmers shouldn't object), the text cursor is advanced to the first line of the next paragraph following reformat. Boxer doesn't appear to offer any way to store and manage frequently used text (addresses, introductions, and so on).

Pros: Aside from the three 'Cons', Boxer ranks among the top five general purpose text editors available today. HTML, XML, Java, Jscript and VisualBasic coders in particular will love this one. Writers will love the fact that the program offers some color and other niceties in the interface configuration along with a number of text formatting shortcuts. Boxer offers a raft of features that are rare among the current crop of popular text editors, including for example the option to automatically highlight the background of the current line. Similarly, the option to use shaded tab zones makes it easy to identify real tabs, distinguishing them from extra spaces and so on. For all you HTML programmers, Boxer allows you to drag & drop image files onto your code and automatically writes an IMG=SRC tag which includes the image name, height and width. The HTML tag closing function is another timesaver found only in advanced editors—every time you type a tag, Boxer automatically displays the correct closing tag and places the cursor in between. Very cool. I particularly liked Boxer's dual monitor feature which always displays dialog boxes in the middle of the application window rather than split annoyingly across both monitors. The Boxer online help system is a model for other software makers to copy. The Boxer system uses a categorized and sub-categorized conversational style in each topic, resulting in clear explanations and actual configuration discussions about most items. The author's approach gives Boxer users a thorough understanding of how and why all of the features and functions work and interact with each other. Somebody has spent a lot of time thinking about this and the end result is excellent. Bravo (or Brava as the case may be). If you're an occasional Java or Visual Basic programmer, a serious HTML or XML programmer, or if you're looking for a powerful writing tool, you owe it to yourself to take Boxer for a test drive. Recommended.