What's so great about Zoot?

Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Aug 26, 2007 at 06:42 AM

What do you think causes features’ stealthiness? Or Zoot’s features in particular to be stealthy? Can Zoot be characterized as a program with great features but a terrible interface, in that hiding the important features partly defines ‘poor interface’?

I’ve found Clipmate 7, a clipboard manager, to have personally more useful text smoothing features than dedicated text manipulators (such as Text Monkey) or even text editing programs. ClipCache 3 is also strong this way. How would you rate Zoot relative to these clip managers for basic text smoothing?

For manipulating text in ways more related to substance, plain text programs easily do more than rtf, which seems to have to do with plain text itself having a generic relationship to a plain text file. So you can do some things I think pretty cool with plain text, although I seldom actually have used them. For example, some plain text programs easily take a file and insert its content into a clip, in one stroke. Or allow you to split a clip and create a new clip or a new text file from part of a clip in one stroke. These operations strike me as appealingly elegant, but somehow haven’t been appealing enough to motivate my using them. (Which means little, because you cannot overestimate the force of habit.) The best plain text only clipboard manager, AceText, does these sorts of things very directly and transparently. I wonder how its prowess in this particular range of functions compares to Zoot.

One other Zoot question. Has the limit on item size been overcome in the 32k version? (If so, why isn’t this a cause for great celebration among Zoot users? If not, what are the plans and prospects?)

Chris Murtland wrote:
>Also, I think Zoot is one of those that tends to make more sense when the details of
>specific usage scenarios are discussed, rather than just a summary of features.
>Perhaps that could be said of any software, but Zoot’s features tend to be stealthy
>rather than obvious.