A major failing of the Beeb when compared to other home micros these days is its Basic editing facilities. Beebed hopes to right the balance a little with a full screen editor for BBC Basic programs.

Beebed bears a striking resemblance to Wordwise in style and use. Typing *BEEBED puts your machine into edit mode. A mode 7 screen displays a page of your program which can be edited by moving the cursor to the section requiring attention and just typing in the corrected version. The function keys are used to good effect to scroll back and forth through your program, move directly to the top, the bottom, or a particular line, delete whole line, and so on. Beebed only actually makes the correction when Return is pressed so you can alter an entire page and then change your mind with the 'undo' key and everything is back to square one.

Pressing Escape, like Wordwise, gives you the main menu from which programs can be loaded and saved, sections of program moved around, deleted, renumbered , and searched for the occurrence of any string. These features are all thoroughly idiot proofed and have such options as remembering the last name you gave to a file with the option to use it again.

The only slight niggle with Beebed is that, despite its likeness to Wordwise, Shift with a cursor key moves you one page up or down the program and Ctrl with a cursor key moves to the top or bottom - the exact opposite to Wordwise. Most confusing if you've used both! However, this is merely a niggle that does not blemish an otherwise excellent, if a little expensive, product.