By David Gewirtz
There are a certain few Windows products that are unsung classics. These are often special-purpose products that do one thing, and do that one thing better than anything else in the world. They're products that have been around for years and years, often more than a decade, and have been lovingly refined, year after year, release after release, adding a selective feature here, meeting a user request there, until they're perfect examples of what a software tool can be.
SnagIt, which I reviewed a year or so ago, is one such product. And UltraEdit, which I'm reviewing here, is another. UltraEdit, shown in Figure A, is a text editor -- and, at Version 15, it's been lovingly updated and refined for the past 15 years.
FIGURE A
This is the Technical Writer environment for UltraEdit. (click for larger image)
When I reviewed SnagIt (a screen capture program), I described it as:
But SnagIt goes way beyond basic capture. Maniacally beyond. The Joker in Arkham Asylum maniacally beyond. "When super-villains want to scare each other, they tell Joker stories." That kind of maniacally beyond.
UltraEdit goes that far beyond being a basic notepad. UltraEdit is a completely insane, feature rich notepad/text editor and it's simply quite wonderful.
To give you an idea of how many features this program has, the program has various pre-configured environments. So if you're a tech writer, or a Java or PHP code, or a system administrator, or an HTML jock, you select the environment you want, and the program reconfigures itself to best fit your usage, hiding all the less relevant features and elevating to visibility all the features that you'll likely need.
There's no way we have space for all the features this fully crazy program offers. Here's a summary of the categories of features:
- Programmer's features
- Database handling features
- File management features
- Printing features
- Text editing features (HTML, CSS, etc.)
- Search and replace features
- Project/workspace features
- Editor display and customization features
- Formatting features (text, XML, etc.)
- Column/block editing features
- Macro and scripting features
- Advanced configurable features
- Window management features
- Help and support features
- Hex editor features
The complete feature list scrolls on for pages and pages. Go ahead. Click here if you want to see them all.
