But I have been a user of UltraEdit for many many years (maybe 20?) and I still find it much more natural to use.
I found it while looking for an editor to replace Semware's Qedit (DOS).
I wonder why UltraEdit has not much love here.
I do find Sublime's price much better than UltraEdit.
I love it in general, but in particular there's one feature that I can't do without: column mode. I don't understand why other editors haven't copied it (at least to my knowledge. If you know any other that has it, I'd like to know). For those of us that often work with CSV-like formats, it's a real time saver.
It's also better behaved for huge files than any other editor I've tried.
The BRIEF editor for MS-DOS, intended to be a "Programmer's Editor", some time before 1990, already included column mode and many other features that few editors have today.
Add to that vi keybindings to ST, and you can get better and faster "column mode-like" editing.
It's the only editor I'm aware of that can do do disk-based editing, that is you can open a file of multiple gigabytes quickly and edit it because it doesn't load the whole file into RAM.
It will happily allow you to edit TB large files
When I tried Sublime 2 I wanted to like it but it just felt weird, so I went back to… TextMate, which probably feels weird to other (especially younger) people. But I’d been using TextMate forever and had a lot of things integrated with my shell so that was my “normal.”
I’ll give Sublime another try though: I want their business model to work, I love that they’re cross platform, and the plug-in API looks pretty nice now that I’ve done a bunch of Python work.
Emacs for Org-mode - arguably the most revelatory single piece of software I've seen in 40 years of working with Software. Notepad++ is a safety crutch that I haven't let go.
Visual Code is OK. Not exciting though lots of respect for it.
UtlraEdit's smoothness, speed and polish are highly commendable. Just don't have the need to spend on the annual licensing for it.
I have used Notepad++ as my regular non-IDE editor for probably 15 years; there are a handful of (semi-)unique features that I really appreciate. I'm guessing UltraEdit keeps its user base for similar reasons.
Never took to TSE, sequence of bad experiences with stability.
Since then, I've used notepad2 for quick editing. And even for coding. Really loved notepad2. It could only edit one file at a time but that was part of its charm. I would have multiple notepad2 files open while coding.
Back in the DOS days I used Brief, Multi-Edit (syntax highlighting!!) and the Borland SideKick TSR notepad, remember that?
Nowadays on Linux, I code and write everything on Vim. Can't live without it. Cured my carpal tunnel too because I don't have to move my fingers to use the arrow keys or mouse.
Just from looking at the screenshots on their site I wouldn't install it (because of it's ugly UI).
UltraEdit just feels like it's stuck 10 years in the past.
It's not fast and has a large lack of theme support (there's no solarized theme for it, which is industry standard at this point).
I just didn't like it and would rather use a more modern editor, e.g. sublime. Only took a day or two to write the required plugins to get our language support for it.
I have no relation to them by the way, latest version that I own is 26 something. While the latest release is 28 something.
Maybe it is because 28 years ago, when it first released, internet was just starting.
Sublime is "only" 13 years old, so internet was already very much mainstream.
But it is really good. Very fast. I love the column mode.
If I search for UltraEdit in HN, the latest post if from 10 years ago, when they announced the Mac version:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019148
Crazy.
From the website it looks like a Windows-oriented tool. If it weren't for your product I wouldn't have even guessed they had a Mac version. I bet they'd do much better with adoption if they customized their homepage screenshots to the platform viewing the page…
For others curious about Column Mode, here's their link with a nice video: https://www.ultraedit.com/support/tutorials-power-tips/ultra...
Apparently in VS Code you can do similar things: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/codebasics#_column...
1. Hold ⇧⌥ and drag for box select.
2. Press ⇧⌥⌘↓ for "column select down"
3. Run "Toggle column selection mode" and ⇧↓.
TIL. Looks great!
I've learned about mac text editors from online ruby on rails tutorials. Both TextMate and SublimeText put me in awe, coming from windows based development they seemed much more polished. It was specifically marketed as distraction free and a lot of my university peers preferred them over whatever tutors were trying to push down our throats (mostly eclipse at that time).
I'd hazard a guess it's just marketing that makes the difference in popularity. I've seen both Sublime and TextMate being used a lot in talks. They tend to present very well in, ehrm, presentations. Try doing that with UltraEdit. Toolbars and other "cruft" get in the way
It's not really an IDE and I've never used it to write code.
The niche it filled was surpassed by Notepad++ and other free tools.