UltraEdit

Today I wanted to talk about another useful utility - UltraEdit. However, I'm not going to put this one under the standard "useful utilities" header that all the others have gone into. The reason being is UltraEdit unlike all the other utilities is not free. This one costs money, but to me this program is totally worth it.

UltraEdit is probably the best most powerful text editor you can find. I wouldn't even describe it as Notepad on steroids because that way underestimates what UltraEdit does. It has a built in hex editor - I love the ability to perform hex search and replaces. It colorizes code and web files to make them easier to edit. It edits files of any size, I've worked on 4GB files before. Just tons of features. They are up to version 16 and the last version I licensed was 5, so I'm sure there are tons of new features I'm not aware of.

I discovered UltraEdit in college around 1997. A friend of mine had a copy of it and I was very impressed with it. I think I originally pirated a copy of it from him and used that (my ethics as a poor college student weren't the best). After about a year or so I felt guilty because this was a very good program and I used it a lot. So I decided to become a legal owner and purchased a license. This continues to be one of the most used programs on my system.

They have a demo you can download and try for free. Give it a try, you might find it so useful you want to spend the $60.