Windows Text Editor Primer Tutorial
Many computer users may think that in this day and age a good text editor would not be needed. As a programmer I’d disagree (and largely it will be people dealing with “sort of” non-proprietry text source (programming code) that will disagree). You can do without Text Editors, especially if you use an IDE with its own built-in editing arrangements. It is true, that you can feel totally “looked after” by your favourite IDE, and never want to come out for air, which is great if you get to do everything you want to do. Sometimes it is good to look back, though, and even though IDEs (and Word Processors) might have caused the need for Text Editors to subside a bit, the Windows “Rolls Royce” Text Editor called UltraEdit (and UltraCompare) remain outstanding pieces of software, or rather, a suite of software.
The thing about brilliant (Windows) Text Editors like UltraEdit is, that you don’t have to think of them as a total solution to anything, but an independent augmentary tool for you, especially with all the easy to reach functionality it provides. Did you know, regarding UltraEdit, that it has functionality to:
- Compare files for differences
- File type/extension software code syntax understanding
- Search/Replace with regular expression system (UltraEdit’s own)
- Search/Replace in multiple files
- Hex editing
- Hotkeys with (recorded) macros and scripting
- Inhouse project facilities
- Encryption/decryption
- Sort
- FTP/Telnet
You will see from the tutorial today some visuals of this deep level of functionality to aid you with the creation or editing of files (normally text) on Windows.
Here is a link to IDM Computer Solution’s download area for UltraEdit and UltraCompare, and others.
Pretty obviously, UltraEdit is not the only Windows Text Editor out there, and you can use the Notepad and Wordpad that come with Windows to satisfy many requirements, and have, personally, been impressed by TextPad.
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