Someone reviewed v on Jul 5, 2022

Pros: 555

Cons: 555

Bottom Line: 555

harvaparva reviewed v22.20.0.36 on Oct 31, 2015

Best text editor out there, other products just don't have the same overall functionality in depth, we can all have our favorites but once you've paid your money and learnt the interface nothing comes close, Tip: Buy the
Unlimited upgrades option and never pay again

sn0wflake reviewed v22.0.46.0 on Mar 27, 2015

Used to be the ultra best editor before it became bloatware and free alternatives appeared like Notepad++.

harvaparva reviewed v21.30.1016 on Oct 31, 2014

I'd have to disagree with -1, I'm also a lifetime license user of UE, and started using about 15 years ago. The start up time on my system is under 3 seconds and loading large files is still on par with other editors.

I've tried other editors recently myself, such as EmEditor and Sublime Text etc, but they all seam to be lacking in the areas I use daily, such as simple to use templates, good macro control, embedded compilers using Tools Configuration etc.

Yes the start-up time on others editors may be faster but once you've waited a tiny bit longer, it's much more productive when editing, and with loads more features.

Having heard the tribal rivalries of other people favorite editors being better, once I've tried them, I just can't help coming back to the best, it may be expensive but you get what you pay for in life.

-1 reviewed v21.20.2014 on Aug 31, 2014

I have a lifetime license for UE. I love UE's features and its design. I've tried all the other text editors, including all the freebies that people rave about simply because they are freebies. None of them cut the turd.

The problem is that UE is a slug. It's aggravatingly sluggish. Not just to launch, but ... to do everything. Even scrolling in a large file is annoyingly slow in UE. It's just not a good user experience.

I also deeply despise the way they make paying users suffer in their attempts to curb piracy. Years ago, they added anti-piracy bloat and made launch times 10x slower. They still have that crap, but now, they also block other applications from having anything to do with the UE window. This means I can't use Actual Window Manager on UE, for one thing.

I'm seriously considering switching to EmEditor, even though that editor lacks some functionality I consider basic (FTP, a favorite file feature, etc.).

extremely well reviewed v21.20.1004 on Jul 23, 2014

UltraEdit v21.20 Changes (2014-06-26)
UltraEdit v21.20 includes over 150 improvements and fixes to the following:

Column mode editing / drag 'n drop
Quick column mode
Hide / show lines and code folding
Folding for block comments in HTML
Scripted find / replace
Perl regular expression find/replace
Find in files with customized output format
Shebang detection for syntax highlighting
Compare files (UC Lite)
Mixed line terminator handling
Open file under caret via context menu
Word wrap
Undo/redo
Hex mode
Themes and user interface
Menu access via key accelerators
OEM and special character input
File and selection sort
CSS color tooltips
Project and workspace reload
Status bar
FTP connectivity and transfer issues
Scrolling via mouse wheel in FTP dialogs
Stability and performance
And more...

http://www.ultraedit.com...dit/latest-changes.html

cyberguy reviewed v21.20.1001 on Jun 28, 2014

I've been using Ultraedit since about version 2 and have a lifetime license.

While the editor has a lot of useful features I can't find on any other editor, I find that those really useful features stopped coming at around version 12. These days it is so horribly bloated and slow to use that I have pretty much stopped updating even though it costs me nothing to do so.

For me this product stopped being a must-have editor at v12. Everything added since then is pretty much pointless fluff for me. Giving it a 3 since this software has stopped being innovative.

Hilbert reviewed v21.00.1033 on Feb 20, 2014

My view of this current UltraEdit 21.00.1033 has not fundamentally altered since my previous review of U/E 20.00 (hereunder), which is that it is now a huge overly bloated text editor that's grown like Topsy and thus somewhat disorganized and confusing to use (especially for the casual user).

This version of U/E adds a few new features such as improved 'Quick Find', 'Multi-caret' editing that allows—as its web site says—'multiple changes in different places in your file at one time'—a dangerous operation unless you're an experience user who is very familiar with what you're doing; and there's also changes to the inbuilt FTP client browser which U/E's site espouses as multi-pane with many improvements. (To me, the FTP section looks uncannily like a clone of FileZilla.)

UltraEdit is aimed at developers and such who spend considerable time editing, and it has an exorbitant price to match of $79.95. I have not had sufficient time to verify that the bugs which were present in v20 are fully ironed out in this version.

One of the major obstacles to using UltraEdit since version 17 is that the program is activated a la Windows which means that you can't move it around on a memory stick and such. Locking the product to a particular machine, is perhaps tolerable for programs such as Windows and Photoshop, but frankly it's quite ridiculous to do so for a text editor (for me, this is not a piracy issue—I've multiple legit earlier versions—but it's often impractical especially in the early stages of fixing/reinstalling a PC before U/E is able to go online to be validated, especially if the program's demo mode has already timed out). Even though I've access to lifetime upgrade licences, I still prefer to use version 16.20 as it's not encumbered with this ergonomically-unfriendly activation nonsense. [It seems, as a concession, U/E can now be installed on three machines, each with their own activation (perhaps activation was causing Ian Mead's sales to fall excessively).]

That said, in fairness to U/E, I should clarify what I said in my earlier review of v20. For the average user I'd still strongly recommend the freeware Notepad++ (or perhaps free RJ TextEd) in preference to U/E, but Notepad++ cannot handle very large text files without crashing (it's a design fault rather than a bug)—but UltraEdit can.

U/E has always been able to edit reasonably large text files of 10s to some hundreds of megabytes but until version 20 it's been a first-class dog at so doing. It was slow and unresponsive even with the large file settings enabled, and with really large files it'd take ages before the scrollbar would free up—and it if didn't then U/E had locked up altogether or crashed! For me, the solution was always the venerable 30+-year-old VEDIT to the rescue, as it would have no trouble with 2GB text files.

That's changed somewhat for the better with U/E v20 onward. I tried U/E 21 on an old mbox (Eudora/MBX) mail file of about 740MB, which is essentially a super-sized text file, and U/E 21 loaded it comparatively quickly and without fault, which is a considerable improvement over earlier versions before v20 (they would have had great difficulty with a file of that size). However, even though U/E loads the file it is almost impossible to slide the scrollbar through such a large file with reasonable granularity/fineness—ergonomically it's hopeless to use and the problem needs to be fixed in future versions.

In summary, for most users use Notepad++--it's free! For diehards and those with special requirements, use UltraEdit—but before you commit to it, I'd strongly recommend you try VEDIT. http://vedit.com/index.html

VEDIT is far from the classiest of editors but it's a true heavy-duty tractor of an editor with a long solid lineage (VEDIT pro64 will even edit 100GB+ file!!!), and it's a similar price to UltraEdit. Moreover, it's not encumbered with that activation nonsense (or it wasn't when I bought my last copy—v 6.1, the current latest version being now v6.23).

Hilbert reviewed v20.00.1037 on Sep 5, 2013

I'm still using 16.20 even though I too have a lifetime license (16.20 was about the last version that wasn't overly bloated). UltraEdit has gone from a must-have-at-any-cost editor to one that's passé. It's slow, buggy and overly convoluted. And most of the other resent criticisms from posters I'd generally agree with.

I too use Notepad++ for many jobs, it's come a long way, and it's free, and you can put it on as many machines as you like. Unless you've a very specific editing requirement such as the need to use a particular u/e wordfile then I'd recommend just using Notepad++.

cmhbytehead reviewed v20.00.1037 on Sep 4, 2013

I'm still running 19.10.0.1012. There is no update, and I thought the next one was going to be 19.20 anyway.

I've been using this for years. I have a lifetime license for it, and they have been responsive to my concerns (yes, UTF-8 can be problematic...). But I know it like the back of my hand. Changing over to something else, paid or free, would be a pain.

Although I am trying to learn some VIM.

TuxmanXP reviewed v20.00.1037 on Sep 4, 2013

Hm, well. At least it has become faster now.

ssb reviewed v18.10.0 on Jun 2, 2012

Buggy, slow, bloated cr@p

Inray reviewed v17.20.0 on Sep 4, 2011

@HeilNizar: There are many editors out there much better than the NotePad++ though UltraEdit is definitely not one of them.

UE not only is bloated, unreliable, slow and buggy but also suffers from a number of very serious encoding issues especially when using Unicode / UTF8. I've lost days of work in the past due to all these issues.

On the contrary, editors with full Uniscribe support like EmEditor and EditPlus as well as a few others like HippoEdit or AkelPad work great with Unicode, are light in resource usage and disk footprint and perform faster and much more stable than this junk.

HeilNizar reviewed v17.20.0 on Sep 3, 2011

Do some people still use anything other than Notepad++?!!!