Text Editors

Everyone needs a good text editor beyond the standard Notepad and Wordpad applications that come with the Windows operating system. Bare minimum, a good text editor should:

  • Be able to read and preserve the original file format (good for when you are dealing with files on different operating systems).
  • Be able to convert file formats (if necessary).
  • Support power user hotkeys like being able to hop to line numbers, etc.
  • Be able to handle complex regular expressions in both a single file and multiple files. This great for string finds and replacements.
  • Be lightweight (i.e. consume very little system memory) and be fast.
  • Be able to do file compares against both single files and directory structures (including complex nested structures).

A few editors worth considering are:

I’ve used SlickEdit for years but just recently started using the UltraEdit/UltraCompare combo and am very impressed. UltraCompare is equivalent to SlickEdit’s DIFFzilla tool. It just happens that UltraEdit and UltraCompare are two separate software installs while DIFFzilla is included in the SlickEdit install.

Check ‘em out.

Thursday, September 28th, 2006 Software

5 Comments to Text Editors

  1. How does this work with using Eclipse? Do they have a plugin? Or is it mainly for working with files outside of that IDE?

    2. Mike Hambleton on October 1st, 2006

  2. It works fine from Eclipse as long as you define it as an external application and associate file types within Eclipse to use UltraEdit. Much like any other tool you might want to add-on or make Eclipse aware of. Although, depending on how you configure your file associates within Windows for UltraEdit, you might not even need to define UltraEdit as an external tool because Eclipse will use the default Windows file association.

    UltraEdit does not produce an Eclipse plug-in that I am aware of like SlickEdit does. Although, to be honest, I’m not sure I’m fond of having SlickEdit or UltraEdit as plug-ins to Eclipse. The reason is that I actually prefer to have a dedicated tool outside of the scope of Eclipse that I can ALT+TAB to. This grants me increased screen real-estate and specialized features.

    3. Brooke Kuhlmann on October 1st, 2006

  3. Update: I have updated the original post to include the E Text Editor. Thanks Brant!

    4. Brooke Kuhlmann on March 15th, 2007

  4. Notepad++ is a free text editor that competes with Ultra-Edit. It’s a SourceForge project: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net.

    5. Stephen Long on April 3rd, 2007

  5. Thanks, Stephen. I’ve updated the original post with your link.

    6. Brooke Kuhlmann on April 3rd, 2007

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