The Revo, as well as other portable computers which use the same EPOC operating system, come with a good suite of productivity programs, including Word. However, Word is best at editing its own files, not plain text. Therefore, RMR Software have written the free RMRText as a simple text editor, with the added benefit of being able to edit hexadecimal code. I reviewed version 2.2.

When you start RMRText, you get the option of beginning with either editor when you open a file - although, and you enable the 'open file dialog on startup' option in the Preferences screen. Any file on the Revo's internal disk can be opened, although there is no way to open files on the ROM chip.

RMRText's text editor component launches in a separate window on top of RMRText, and, according to the help file, uses part of the operating system for the editor. Although you cannot use the menu, keypresses like Ctrl+Shift+C for special characters and Ctrl+C for copy are available.

Arial is the font used for the text editor view. It would be useful, though not essential, if this could be optionally changed to Courier New - some documents in plain text format are laid out in a way which needs a fixed-width font like Courier to display properly.

Switching to hex editor mode, the program asks if you want to save your changes, regardless of whether you made any or not. I don't know about the feasibility of this, but it would be welcome if there was some way of avoiding this dialogue when you hadn't made any changes, particularly if you often switch between text and hex mode.

In hex mode, the hexadecimal code is shown alongside a plain text version, but the connection between them is not coded well. If you tap on one of the letters in the plain text version, entirely the wrong code is highlighted in the hex version - sometimes one of the letters in the text version is highlighted instead! If you look along each line on the display, though, all the codes and letters correspond.

Badly-formed letters abound in the plain text display, parts of the right side of them missing sometimes. This can make things awkward.

You might think that after this less than rave review, I might discount RMRText as useless. However, it is free, and you RMR don't have to give anything! RMRText is a competent program, despite its bugs and less than ideal ways of doing some things. Try it, and if you don't like it, you've not lost anything!