>Is there a fairly powerful third party text editor that works well with the mere mortals framework?

TextPad (www.textpad.com) is very good and more full-featured than some of the freebies. EditPlus (www.editplus.com) and UltraEdit that Tim mentioned both appear to be very similar to TextPad, give or take a couple of features.

Another popular editor is PFE (Programmer's File Editor). The PFE Home Page is http://www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe/ where you can find links to download it.