UltraEdit Beats the Competition

In January, we compared text editors for Windows, actually hoping to avoid paying for another upgrade to UltraEdit. The comparison included PSPad, Notepad++, EditPlus, UltraEdit, e, inType, TextPad, Crimson, jEdit, Vim, and some others. PSPad looked very good (especially for free), but ultimately the robust feature set and quality of UltraEdit set it apart from the others. The upgrade to version 12 was easily worth the minor cost.

Version 13 Beta

The UltraEdit 13.00 Beta is looking pretty snazzy. It has many new features, including

• Integrated scripting support – by integrating the JavaScript engine, UltraEdit supports user-written scripts. The UE application object allows interaction with the editor and documents.
• Spell check while typing – as you type, UltraEdit optionally indicates words that it thinks are misspelled and (after right-clicking the word) offers replacement suggestions. Normal spell-check is also available.
• Search in Favorite Files
• Search and Replace will step through all open files
• Search in Files for any files not containing search string
• User customizable format of Search in Files result
• Integrated IE browser support to show active HTML file
• Ability to define a persistent selection
• Cursor word-right or word-left to optionally stop at an underscore
• Syntax highlighting support of verbatim string literals
• Nested comments for languages
• Prompt before UE is set as View Source Editor during install
• and more

UltraEdit Scripting

Users can now create scripts (written in Javascript) that use the UltraEdit application object to access the editor and documents (along with normal Javascript features). According to the help file, the following is supported.

Spell Checking While You Type

As-you-type spell checking is now part of UltraEdit. Right-clicking the misspelled word (indicated by a dashed underline) displays possible correct spellings.

Built-in IE HTML Preview

A welcome addition is a built-in browser control to view HTML as you edit it.

XML Preview

A handy side effect of the IE integration is that if a document begins with an XML declaration (<?xml version="1.0"?>) the preview uses IE’s built-in stylesheet for XML.

Conclusion

There are, of course, still some bugs in the beta. A few fields in new dialogs have odd behavior. Strangely enough, given the addition of a Javascript scripting engine, syntax highlighting for JavaScript is not automatically enabled (nor was it immediately apparent how to enable it).

Overall, however, the new features are important and working well. Things are looking good for the next version of UltraEdit and it should be another worthy upgrade.