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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

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tiffanyh·

UltraEdit

I never understood why there was so much love for BBEdit on Mac and so little love for UltraEdit on Windows.

They were both released around the same time, selling to the same audience just on different platforms.

This was also during a time where there was many options.

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I’m a Mac user, but for my job I have a company Windows laptop. It used to come with UE and I absolutely loved it. I work with large XML files (think 500 MB) a lot and UE would open/format/xpath/regex/etc. them with 0 issue.

Then upper management forgot they employed engineers and did not renew the license.

Now I’m stuck with VS Code which chokes when I open a 20 MB file.

UltraEdit has "true" support for large files meaning it doesn't have to load the whole thing into memory like most other editors (including BBEdit).

I guess Mac users are more easily impressed because there is (was) less choice and UltraEdit(32) wasn't around on the platform at the time.

It's still my editor of choice but it's a shame that they switched to a subscription model.

On the Windows side there were a bunch of editors that had similar features or had already solved the issues BBEdit solved for Mac users. It was popular, but not ubiquitous the way BBEdit was.

I haven’t kept up with it but UE is still the most functional editor I’ve used. I’ve dabbled in Sublime, BBEdit, VIM and others but UE had some tricks none other have matched.

UltraEdit is on the Mac now. It's not as polished as the Windows version but it is good and you get UltraCompare with it as well.

Much like iOS seems to drive app sales better than android, in the old days Macs had the best shareware

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