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Southwest Gaming ExpoWorkshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2009)ICIDS 2009 Interactive StorytellingGlobal Game Jam
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Jump to: Software All product reviews |
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Introduction
Writing a review about UltraEdit is like writing a review for NotePad. But then, while their respective base functionality is the same (edit text files), their feature set is quite different.
I've been using UltraEdit since quite some years, first with my employers, now with my own license. The early versions were just what I wanted: an easy to use, flexible and yet powerful text editor. But much to my regret, the easy to use part has changed to a complicated, feature-bloated editor.
The version used for this review is 15.10.0.1026.
Integration and functions
UltraEdit is a stand-alone editor, so there isn't much integration into anything. That's not a bad thing but I wanted to have it mentioned here. It's a quite versatile editor and as such, it offers to select different environments which basically change the layout of the different panels of the editor. The simplest one is the notepad replacement which keeps the directly available functionality to a strict minimum. You'll find the file view, tabbed open files and tool bars such as the open address toolbar and the main toolbar containing file access and search functions (see Picture 1). This is UltraEdit in it's very basic form. Even the available functionality through the top menu (File, Edit, Insert, ...) is very reduced and don't offer options such as the hex-editor which is available in the programmer or power environment.
Picture 1: The notepad replacement (click for full size)
The more powerful the selected environment is, the more options you get and the more complicated it gets to use the editor. At first glance, this might not be a problem but once you start searching a specific function that you only need once a year, you totally get lost in what is available with the possibility to not find what you're actually searching. This get's particularly confusing if you're switching the environment from time to time to reflect what you're currently working on.
Picture 2: The programmer's environment
Picture 3: The power user
UltraEdit enables you to create projects to which you can easily add files or entire folders. This enables you to quickly open a specific set of files to edit and manage. Using the right click in the project tab opens a context menu with management functionality.
Picture 4: Project settings
Picture 5 Project context menu
The integration of search functionality is quite extensive allowing you to not only search across the opened files, folders or projects but also directly do web searching. Different search engine providers are listed and searching for a specific word is as simple as placing the cursor on the word and clicking onto the search engine provider's icon. This will open the web browser and display the search result. If you haven't already a web browser open, this is a quite handy functionality (especially if you're too lazy to do 10 clicks if 2 clicks is enough).
I most often use the editor to do some data file stuff. Editing XML-files, do some hex editing etc. Fortunately UltraEdit contains functionality helping me here. It not only has syntax highlighting (XML, C/C++, Java, PHP, etc) but also has folding functions to quickly blend out parts of the code you don't want to see. The XML Manager displays a tree view of the currently open xml file informing me about any error he might have found when parsing the file. Unfortunately, the reported error line isn't always the accurate error position. In Picture 6 I've added an error in line 74. The reported error line is the very last line of the file. Once I fixed the error, I got a correct display of the xml tree (see Picture 7).
Picture 6: XML error
Picture 7: Corrected error and XML tree view
UltraEdit for itself doesn't enable you to start the compiler or the debugger. This is reserved to another IDM product called UEStudio. This limits the use of UltraEdit for programmers who would like to rely to a single editor within which they can do all their work. But then, I've learned over the years that most often it's better to rely on specific editors for specific tasks instead of hoping a "one to rule them all" tool (although Visual Studio get's pretty close to that).
If you don't find you happiness within the hundreds of features already included in UltraEdit, you might want to implement your own features to help you in your tasks. UltraEdit includes a java based scripting engine supporting core functionality of JS 1.7.
The Hex editor is of limited use, too. I've encountered problems adding new values in between two values or adding new values to the end of the file. That doesn't seem to be possible.
Options
UltraEdit has a lot of features and some of them are configurable. The basic setup for each environment will help you to quick start but you might want to trigger one or another option to adapt UltraEdit to your liking. Taking the example of the above mentioned web search, you quickly find out that the number of search engines you might use is limited to 10. It's not possible to add another search engine. The rest of the options tend to a similar direction. It's not possible to point to an alternate script folder or to configure the XML Manager to directly expand the tree.
Pricing
UltraEdit surely isn't the most expensive editor on the market. The per user license costs $49.95 with price regressions from 25 licenses on. It's possible to add a second year of upgrades at additional 40% of costs or add unlimited upgrades at 200% additional costs (making it $149.85).
Conclusion
I must admit that I use UltraEdit less and less. Some years back it really added some great features to the standard notepad but as of today, there are some editors that are almost as powerful and free. The feature bloating of the recent years surely hasn't done any good to the software and IDM would have done better if they had improved what was already there.
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