Quick Summary
One of the best investments I ever made was to pony up a few extra bucks over a decade ago to buy the lifetime license for UltraEdit. It’s lightning fast, has more features than a dozen Swiss army knives, has fantastic, responsive and personal support (no outsourced tech support that claims their name is “Ken” and only responds with canned messages), and is just a an all-around fantastic editor for anything text-based (code, XML, etc).
All the basic stuff you’d expect from any decent code editor is in there (syntax highlighting, expandable/collapsible sections, bookmarking lines, etc…), but UE takes it many steps further.
Do you work with XML documents often? Use built-in tools to navigate through XML documents easily, quickly and reliably reformat / prettify them in a click, and more!
Need to edit or view a document in hex? Just hit Ctrl+H to toggle between the views (it auto-defaults to hex for binary files).
Need support for different character sets or want to convert between them? It’s a matter of selecting the desired character set from a dropdown.
Did Windows blue-screen while you were editing a document? No worries – UE keeps draft copies automatically and recovers them for you on the next startup.
Want to edit in columns (e.g. add a comma before 1000 lines all at once)? No problem – switch to column edit mode.
Need powerful search-and-replace functionality that works with different regex engines and also supports filesystem searches? UE’s got that.
Need macros? Not a problem, and hotkeys make it a breeze to do quick recording and repeated playback. There’s a full macro editor for more advanced functionality.
Want to define your own custom commands? Easy.
Want an ASCII table? Yeah, that’s built in.
Need integrated SFTP, SSH, and similar file transfer support? Yeah, that’s also built in so you can edit a file, hit save, and have it auto-upload.
Need to edit HUGE, multi-gigabyte files? No problem.
Need easy-to-navigate file tabs? That’s a default.
Want to compare two files? That’s built in, and it’ll even guess the right files you want to compare based on filename similarity!
And there’s a lot more not covered here, and even more getting added with every version. It’s an absolutely fantastic editor.
Yes, you can get SOME of this via some open-source editors like Notepad++ and I have to use some of those editors on client machines sometimes. There’s just no comparison in terms of how refined UltraEdit is compared to other editors. This is a tool that would be extremely difficult to live without on a day-to-day basis.
Unfortunately, I don’t think they offer lifetime licenses anymore, but it’s well worth the money to own a copy of this if you’re a developer.