[nfbcs] Ed Sharp versus Homer Editor & HTML Editors

[Steve Jacobson]

Joe,

I don't know if Jamal Mazrui is on this list or not, but he may have comments to add to mine since he is the author of Ed Sharp and Homer, and he may even 
disagree with me which is fine.

I am only familiar with Homer as a set of scripts, and if it is also an editor, it is likely far more basic than Ed Sharp.  As scripts, Homer gives some of Jamal's programs a 
uniform way to talk to screen readers and provides a sort of common user interface.  There is both a JFW and Window-Eyes version of Homer.

I have only a limited exposure to EdSharp, but it has a lot of good features.  By all means, you should take a good look at it and if you like it go with it.  I have not 
used it a lot because I have found a number of text editors to work pretty well for me including UltraEdit and NoteTab Pro.  These two editors are not free, but they 
have demos and are inexpensive.  I like the idea of using a program whose primary function is to be a text editor which is not as trivial an undertaking as one would 
think.  At one point, I found some of EdSharp's features to be more sluggish than say UltraEdit, but I do not think that makes them unusable by any means.  In my 
case, I was using UltraEdit long before EdSharp was developed, so I was comparing it to an editor with which I was very familiar.  That makes the comparison not 
completely fair in some ways, and I just didn't find enough reasons to switch.  

The bottom line here is that there are some good alternatives to NotePad for text editing.  EdSharp has many good features and has been written to send speech 
responses directly to screen readers making its response very predictable.  Also, many keystrokes have been added to do all kinds of things that you might find very 
convenient.  A program such as UltraEdit also has many keystrokes built in, but certainly not all of the keyboard functionality of EdSharp.  However, it has a pretty 
good scripting language and scripts can be attached to keystrokes so you can fairly easily create a keystroke that you may find you need.  For my use, some of the 
things that are built into Ed Sharp are just not things I do often enough to remember the associated keystroke.

The point here is just to say that there are alternatives that are quite accessible in addition to EdSharp, and many are going to be superior to NotePad even as text 
editors.  However, EdSharp has a lot to offer and the price is right, and there is a strong commitment from the author to fix problems that are discovered.  However, I 
would at least take the time to compare feature lists to see if there is anything that you see in other editors that you really need.  At the very least, you can then lobby 
with Jamal to add those features if EdSharp doesn't already have them.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

On Mon, 5 Jan 2009 10:23:39 -0500, Joe Orozco wrote:

>Hello all,

>The subject line pretty much sums it up.  Can anyone shed light on the
>difference between Ed Sharp and Homer Editor?  I was looking for an
>accessible HTML editor and came across both programs, downloaded Ed
>Sharp and found it to be far superior to NotePad.  Anyway, if anyone can
>help on distinguishing the two and then maybe offer some suggestions for
>an HTML editor, that would be great.  I've been using NotePad for web
>design, and while I intend to stick to text editors as my primary tool,
>I wouldn't mind the occasional break on redundant tags.  Thanks in
>advance.

>Joe Orozco


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