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UltraEdit Text Editor

ultraedit.com

21–30 of 54 posts

Re: UltraEdit Text Editor

#21
post #7

this editor is exceptional at loading files which are gigabytes in size. nothing else I've ever used comes close.

How about Sublime Text? That’s mostly my use case. Opening giant files that VSCode can’t, Ctrl-F a regex expression, selecting all matches, and pasting them into a new buffer. Like a visual interactive grep. Sublime handles big files pretty well but I’ve still managed to make it chug on occasion.

In Sublime 4 thread people were talking about UltraEdit, it is even probably the reason for this submission.

Anyway, there people mentioned UltraEdit has a "disk edit" mode, where it DOESN'T dump the file on the ram, and instead displays a chunk of whatever is on t he disk, this is how it allows the editing of gigantic text files, theoretically you can edit files of any size, maybe even infinite size.

Re: UltraEdit Text Editor

#23
post #7

this editor is exceptional at loading files which are gigabytes in size. nothing else I've ever used comes close.

How about Sublime Text? That’s mostly my use case. Opening giant files that VSCode can’t, Ctrl-F a regex expression, selecting all matches, and pasting them into a new buffer. Like a visual interactive grep. Sublime handles big files pretty well but I’ve still managed to make it chug on occasion.

I'm not sure your definition of big file. But, the last thing that I tried to edit a full Wikipedia dump (in 2014) the file was 65GB, and it was slow even in UltraEdit. I tried all the editors suggested at the time, including Sublime but notice that VS Code wasn't available at the time. People love their programming editors, but UltraEdit is much more than that. It was an editor for data manipulation. It was the best for managing what used to be considered big files before (and too many other features, including moving around columns of data like what you can do in Excel - try that on other editor), but now the bar for file size is much higher, and UltraEdit had not improved there. The fastest editor for big files according to my tests was EmEditor, and editor that like UltraEdit, is made for loading data files. However, EmEditor can load what in 2021 can be claimed to be big files. It can open filed of up to 248GB in the 32-bit version and 16TB in the 64-bits version of the platform. That (the 64-bits version) is what I call big files.

https://www.emeditor.com/text-editor-features/large-file-sup...

Re: UltraEdit Text Editor

#24
All these "simple" text editors like to show how easy it is to use "multiple cursors" to edit several spots at once but... Even though sometimes it's needed it's really usually a terribly bad way to "refactor". Real refactoring is done across multiple files / config files and that's one area where a real IDE excels. And this comes from an Emacs fan (and I do sometimes use "multiple cursors" in Emacs).

I really don't think it's somehow a "selling point" of a text editor to show that you can edit multiple cursor: what you typically want is real refactoring and multiple cursors simply aren't that at all.

Re: UltraEdit Text Editor

#26
I remember that the site used to have a message from the developer saying that if he got 30 sales he would go full time on the project. 30 sales were faxed through and he considered it a message from God.

Re: UltraEdit Text Editor

#27

I have an older version of Ultraedit (probably 10 years old now). I believe in supporting software developers but I will NEVER pay for a yearly subscription of $80/yr for any piece of software unless it's being expensed by my employer. That's way too expensive once you start using it for a couple of years. $20-30/yr like Sublime is more appropriate. I also have purchased Sublime Text will pay for v4 as well.

I purchased this with my own money in the mid '90 to use in my work computer (Windows 3.11) because it saved me do much time inspecting the data dumps from our old data warehouse in preparation for a migration for the new data warehouse. No other application was able to load files of comparable size at the time.

Re: UltraEdit Text Editor

#30
Some past threads:

UltraEdit text editor for Mac - Now Available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019148 - Dec 2010 (45 comments)

UltraEdit for Mac nears beta... First look - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1517745 - July 2010 (31 comments)

UltraEdit for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937957 - Nov 2009 (15 comments)

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