Stephen R. Diamond wrote:

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?

I don't use clip managers, but since I am a programmer, I do have text editors running all day (my favorites are Notepad++ and e). Zoot does not massage text to the level that a dedicated text editor does, and I don't use Zoot for the same kinds of text manipulation. Manipulating text items in Zoot is mostly about making the information more useful to me within the world of Zoot - getting a grid view that I want or being able to set or retrieve field values from the text. It's lightweight text manipulation that's usually focused on other Zoot-related stuff.

For extensive text manipulation features, you can't beat a dedicated text editor. And, in fact, it's nice to have several.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
http://www.e-texteditor.com/
http://www.editpadpro.com/

Zoot doesn't support regex, but most text editors do (although each may use slightly different syntax). I would say learning regular expressions is probably beyond the purview of most non-technical users, though.