UltraEdit 18.00

Overview

UltraEdit is a powerful text editor that can also help you in all your coding needs. It has all the basic features of a text editor, like paragraph alignment, drag and drop support, print preview while adding some quite rare functions, including highlighting of all occurrences of the selected word, line change indicator in margin, saving selection as a separate file, bookmark support and others. Apart from being a great text editor, it has quite a lot web development features. For example it has full FTP support, syntax highlighting for plenty of languages, CSS style builder, XML manager and a Websearch toolbar for searching highlighted terms from within the editor using one of the supported search providers. There are just a few of UltradeEdit’s features.

Installation

Installation finishes in just a few steps, and if you choose to make the Complete installation then you won’t have to make any configurations at all, because this mode will install all of UltraEdit’s components. If you want to exclude some features, choose the Custom mode and from the features list that will appear you can choose which ones you don’t want installed. Those features include adding an English dictionary, a View Source context menu command and UltraEdit executable to path environment variable. Installation will start in the next step and it might take a while to finish. When it’s over you will be asked if you want to try UltraCompare, another product from IDM.

The program is available for Windows (XP, Vista, 7), Mac and Linux, but we'll focus on the Windows version in this review.

Interface

The main window consists of many smaller windows and boxes, making it confusing to beginners. In the main area is the editor window, where all the text editing takes place. On the left is a pane which has 4 tabs: Project, Open, Explorer and Lists. Those tabs are for managing the files you want to edit. Below is the output window pane and next to it is the template list pane. A few tabs are located vertically on the right that opens small windows when you hover the mouse pointer over them (Bookmark Viewer, Clipboard History, Script List and XML Manager). A lot of toolbars are located on the upper and lower sides of the program too. Of course this is one highly customizable program and all these windows and toolbars can be changed or removed.

Pros

It is far more capable than a normal text editor. It can open files over 4GB without trouble, it has configurable tab options, it highlights all occurrences of a selected word, it has a character ruler and line numbering feature, a dictionary with more than 100,000 words for spell checking in various languages (American English, British English, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish and Swedish), it can save the selected text as a separate file, and the list goes on.

Its usage as a web development tool is not limited either. The provided FTP support allows you to access FTP servers and manage their files, link a local and a remote folder in order to keep them synchronized and store profiles for FTP accounts with different settings.

Syntax highlighting is available for countless languages. The pre-configured languages include C/C++, VB, ASP, Java, JavaScript, PHP, XML, HTML, Perl, Python, Ruby and some other popular ones but wordlists are available for a lot more languages.

The CSS Style Builder will help you create CSS codes easily and fast. It is a utility that depending on the kind of element you want to code, it will automatically generate the style for it. This is exceptionally useful for both professionals and novices.

Another great capability of UltraEdit is its integration with CSE HTML Validator, a simple HTML, CSS, XML spell and syntax-checking software that helps you fix coding issues in your website, thus increasing its traffic and productivity. From within UE you can run CSE HTML Validator to check your code with the click of button.

Cons

It can be very complicated for inexperienced users. Its interface could be simpler and not filled with buttons and windows. Fortunately everything can be customized and removed from sight to make the interface less complex and easier to focus on the editor.

Alternatives

There aren’t many applications that combine advanced text editing features with professional web development functions. One of those programs is Notepad++, an open source text and code editor with support for nearly all languages, with the main drawback of being slow on somewhat big files (100mb+). Vim is another good open source software alternative.

Conclusion

Even though UltraEdit offers some amazing features, it is more approachable by average computer users and professionals rather than beginners, while it has an interface that only an expert would be attracted to. If you're a professional coder then this editor should not be missing from your arsenal.