Thanks to the persistence of Kent Nassen and the generosity of Jeff Wunderlich, the Aurora Text Editor can be downloaded and registered, “…the .bat file command I use to register is: ac -reg “Jeff Wunderlich” “xujcwpkgzngqmqn” 1 Feel free to share it with anyone on the net.”

So what’s the big deal? Well I covered most of it a few years ago in Musing on the Favourite Text Editor (slow link, involves time travel), but at the moment my biggest cause for joy is that I can, once again, select a column and inserting a character or range of characters (useful for turning fixed width text records into delimited text), and filling a columnar selection with an increasing pattern (1,2,3… a,b,c…) similar to Excel’s extend series command.

Since I wrote the musing’s essay I’ve been a happy Cream user,with occasional forays into Notepad++ when speed and portability (happy on a usb key) is desired. Now that Aurora is around and permanently free I’m positively cheery. Yes I know TextPad can do column fills, and TP is a very fine editor indeed. I bought it for work after all, but it’s not cross platform and I don’t want to pay for it on for every computer I use. Besides, Aurora is only a 650kb download. Where else can you get so much editor bang for your buck? Seriously, where else?