Can someone please recommend any plain text file editor or at least viewer? I have been searching high and low in the stores and can't find anything.

This has been discussed before, but the thread is closed. Someone there said:

But no, that does not work for me. I just get a black screen.

Oh, and I think that Mobipocket sucks. It has to be running all the time even when I'm not using it, the letters don't look very good, converting is an inconvenience and their converter requires Windows. So Mobipocket is ruled out.

Thanks for any help.

Thanks, but it is really disappointing to see that I would have to pay that much - every year - to view plain txt files...

I mean, really?? To view plain txt files?

Dig through the archives, there was a 3rd party vendor who made a plain text editor in combination with a MP3 player and other stuff. I forget the name and haven't seen them around in awhile, so who knows what happened. I think it was called 'MultiPlay' or something like that?

(memory is guessing about 7 to 9 months ago in the Aftermarket subforum here)

Yes, dollars5 makes it. I tried it today. But it has no options for font size or face and it looks awful. Too small. Besides, it took too long to load a 150Kb file. I had to pass.

I have to agree that it seems strange to me that there are no standalone text editors that can edit and store ascii files on the SD card. It seems so obvious for a device with a qwerty keyboard. I remember when there were a multitude of text editors for MSDOS machines. Some of them were quite compact and had a nice complement of features: multi-level undo, regular expression search and replace, etc. I think there would be a market for a solid text editor for the BB. It could be used to create documents offline that could be sent as email attachments, or to work on drafts of important emails, that could be copied and pasted into an actual mail later. Some of us have large text files that we need to access and occasionally edit (records, lists, etc). Build it, and people will buy it.

There you have eWord, that is what it is for, among other things. You act like there is nothing out there.
Likewise, this:
http://www.blackberryforums.com/gene...z-docs-go.html

Because it isn't free doesn't mean that it does't exist.

I may be mistaken, but I have the impression that eWord is a word processor, not a text editor. A word processor may be overkill for many purposes, which is why I think there is a niche for a decent text editor.

I'm not expecting free.

Yeah, I never mentioned "free" either. I am a self-employed professional, people try to sabotage the value of my work all the time and that's not fun. I think developers should be paid for their work.

But Beamberry and eOffice are too expensive. Maybe not expensive if you really need all they can offer, but Beamberry is superfluous to me, the native built-in viewer is enough to me, and I really don't see myself editing MS Office documents in this tiny device. The screen and the keyboard just don't cut it. The Palm Foleo would really come in handy now.

But I digress. Plain text files are different from Office files in that they are usually small, we just need them to take down notes and things like that. I won't be writing a lot into them, but I certainly might be reading a lot from them. And that is a very easy format to handle. Geez, I wonder if there is any easier format at all. The Blackberry can handle Word, Excel, music and video, for crying out loud, and can't handle txt? That's just bizarre.

I use txt files on my desktop all the time. I handle a lot of Office documents from customers, but my personal files are all kept in txt. Why wouldn't I? They're small, light and ultra compatible. The Blackberry must be the only computer/system in the world that can't handle them out of the box.

OK, I've made my point. Thanks for the attention and everything.

Oh, and Repligo, also, for full document editing.

For text files, what is wrong with Memo Pad, then? Right "out of the box". I know, it's not got enough features. None of it is just what you specifically want. Could be that there really isn't a big enough market for a text editor, until NOW, what with ability to store the files on the SD card, etc.

You didn't say, but if you're using Outlook for your contacts/calendar/tasks, you could start keeping your text files in Outlook Notes...then you'd have them in outlook and on the BB, you could sync them, and have full view/edit in both places. Seems like a win/win. (That's what I do, so it must be really, really smart.)

Outlook Notes = MemoPad. Same thing, right?

Feature starved indeed, but that is not the deal breaker. It's that it can't open/import .txt files off the SD card. I drag and drop a bunch of music from the PC to the phone, why can't I do the same with txt files? Even the lame pared down LG phone I used to have before I bought the Blackberry would let me do that.

No, I use Linux. And Outlook notes probably have a very short size limit.

That's one of the things I really love about txt: it's very simple and universal. It is a very useful alternative to proprietary formats that companies will really strive to lock us into. That's what I want: nothing that requires conversions, special programs, proprietary formats or any given operating system. I want to use my text files just like I use my MP3 files. Outlook is totally the opposite of what I'm looking for here. Heck, even with e-mail, Outlook will store it in some weird proprietary format. How can I ever trust a solution that does that to an open universal format?

Oh, Linux-arian...why didn't you tell us? Had I known I never would have breathed the word outlook.

Sorry...that was my one brilliant idea for the month. Just tapped out. :(

Well, your question was answered and there is a ready-made solution built in to the BB OS for what you could use. The fact that it is not exactly what you want or would design yourself aside, it does edit text files.

Yes, I think having the SD card available creates more potential uses for a decent text editor. Memo pad is okay. I've been using the Notes feature built into Unyverse, since they are instantly synced. But each note is limited to 4,000 characters.

As an example, I have a text file of references to articles, that I like to be able to refer to. There are hundreds of articles in it, some with short abstracts. With a decent text editor I could edit it, add entries and resort it, find and replace things. I don't need a word processor for this, but an editor with basic features such as replace and sort would be ideal.

I may drop in $0.02, the question has not been appropriately (successfully?) answered yet, I get the spidey sense that luc-mobile and I are common soldiers in the same battle. I *do* use the MemoPad to store notes (and Tasks - neverending Tasks are a sneaky way to store lots of notes that sync around) but it's far, far insufficient for the needs.

Here, lemme plug in my BB and see what texts I have (which I store in \tBooks, much like \eBooks (MobiPocket) and \MDict (dictionaries)) on my card:

As is obvious, I have books, notes, and even a copy of the US Constitution and the script from Breakfast Club sitting on my SD card. MemoPad can *not* handle these things, what luc-mobile and I search for is a good, basic-but-usable plain text editor/viewer that can be found almost anywhere.

Heck, I'd love a mini 'vi' even. :-D

You got that absolutely right, Rivvie! Every man or woman should be entitled to their copy of the Breakfast Club or the Pretty in Pink script in their phones. And it is a very foolish smartphone manufacturer that does not realize that.

Couldn't resist... Jokes aside, that really IS the whole idea.

pfffttt.... those are man movies? More like date movies.
Patton, Godfather and Outlaw Josey Wells are man movies. hmmmph

OK, Rivvie, you've convinced me, we need a better text editor. Only for your reasons though. They are valid, lol.

Look man, Shermer High School, Shermer Illinois 60062 was a staple in my upbringing as a kid. I can still, to this day, recite the Breakfast Club word for word without even watching the movie.

(and yes, I have been called Carl the Janitor here at work - I am the eyes and ears of this institution my friends)

I do a pretty darn good Brando godfather impersonation! I used to practice that as a kid over and over a lot until I finally got the "cotton balls in the cheeks" sound right without having to actually use cotton. Have I ever mentioned way back when I was actually a Theatre major (sets, props & lights) for many years? I have more theatre classes buried in my college transcripts than most people think healthy. (yes, even took makeup and costuming classes...)

Working in computer tech was a complete accident - one day a guy offered me a good paying job, the rest is history.

Hi guys,
There's a notepad application in eFile. It works for me when I need to read a txt file. And it's free.

Dan, how large a file size will it take?

Dollars 5 Complete » txtNotes for Blackberry 8800, 8300 and 8100

Dollars5 has a standalone txt application

I have eFile. That notepad is horrible. It's too limited and clumsy. Besides, it freezes the phone in almost every time I try to open any text file with it.

I've commented on that one. It takes too long to open large files and there is no font selection. The one font it uses is arguably ugly and certainly too small/narrow/cramped.

Missed that...yeah, the font is pretty ugly, I wouldn't argue w/you on that at all.

Not really large, it handled files up to approximately 100 kb for me.

I installed Mobipocket reader on my bb, and I have the 6 beta on the desktop. My ebooks will not trasfer to my memory card. I can transfer by explorer, but MP does not find them.

When I start MR on bb, I get message: "The application mobireader has attempted to open a connection to a location inside the firewall and outside the firewall which is not allowed by your IT policy."

I contacted bb support, and they assured me that my bb has no IT policy. I purchased it from TMO for my personal use.

I have read most of the relevant posts from various forums, but I am yet to find a solution.

Any and all help with the mobireader problem will be appreciated.

bbman... look at this:
Go to Options > Security > General Settings > scroll to the bottom of the screen, under "services". What is under "services"?

I'm unable to get anything but what appears to be the trial version of eFile Pro.

ePad is there, when you open eFile you may see the icon on the low ribbon. Scroll the TB or the wheel to see it.

If anyone here is still interested in plain text viewers as much as I am, check this page at BerryReview.com

Rove Mobile File Manager is a very interesting application that not only supports FTP transfers (I couldn't make it work at all with my BIS connection), but also has a very nice file manager and it opens plain text files. It is not very good: there are no "features" whatsoever in this text editor other than open, edit and save, and it can't open large txt files. Or maybe it can, but it takes forever. I tried a 450Kb file and ended up doing a battery pull after a few minutes. But, well, it's something for us to get by until we get a decent text viewer/editor - if we ever get one. Provided your text files aren't too big, it's very convenient for reading and/or editing those files in your media card.

This is a limitation of BIS, BIS blocks all ports below 1024, so if you are using BIS you cannot use the standard FTP port 21, you must use a higher port on your FTP server. The other option is if you change your connection method to TCP or BES then FTP will work over the standard port.

That is why we put a warning in the product when you open a file larger than 50kb. The BlackBerry does not have a lot of memory for applications to use, so opening a half a meg text file is not easy on the BlackBerry until the devices get more application memory to use.

Thanks for the reply, Paul. I didn't get any "warning" so far, except sometimes Rove will tell me "No viewer found for selected file type". It happens more often with big text files, but with small files too. They are all plain text files, I'm sure. I wonder if there could be any issue with Unix-style line breaks. That's the only thing that I can think of, although all of my text files are Unix-style text files and most of them are opening correctly.

I passed it on to our developer and he says that's it's probably a bug with unicode or extended ascii characters, since we did notice you are in brazil. We will put it down as a bug we need to look at in the future releases.

I haven't tried your two released products yet, in part because using BIS for Mobile Desktop has been a pain. I suspect the issue is with Sprint and the fact that there is no APN to specify. Anybody having better luck with these products from the Sprint/CDMA side of the world?

And Paul, FYI I'm not griping -- trying to get something to work with all the different flavors out there has to be a royal PITA.

To use Mobile Desktop you can simply set the connection method to "BIS - Internet Browser" under Options, this does not require any kind of APN settings, and should work fine on Sprint assuming you have a BIS Data plan. As well BIS will only work if the computer you are trying to connect to has a public IP address on the internet.

Another option is to use our PCMobilizr product, as it simplifies a lot of the configuration pains people have with Mobile Desktop and is much easier to get up and running with:
PCMobilizr - Access your PC from anywhere

I highly recommend that you contact our support team, and they can ask specific questions about your configuration and they can get you up and running in no time:
Rove - Support

Paul,

Thanks for the response -- I wasn't terribly precise.

I have Mobile Desktop working, it is just painfully slow over BIS. Your support staff was quite helpful in getting it working. I think that the issue is the BIS model. I have thought about installing the free BES to get around this issue, but I suspect (haven't researched it completely) that MDS is not enabled on BB Professional.

And I've also considered using PCMobilizr (your announcement of that looked quite good), but I've debated some security-related issues involved in getting an intermediary involved like that requires.

Hopefully that explains why I haven't been pestering your tech support with questions, and also why I'm not completely bent out of shape.

I am also looking for a plain text editor, and if I read this thread correctly there isn't a viable alternative for the blackberry?!

Yes there is, you can use Mobile File Manager to edit plain text files located on your device or on remote servers, it's free too:
Rove - Products - Mobile File Manager for BlackBerry