Why I would take vim or emacs any day:

- versions available for many platforms. Your editing skills on Linux are easily transferrable to Windows or Mac, and others.

- Free, and Open Source.

- Insanely extensible, with a rich collection of extensions and plugins already available.

- Large user base, that keeps improving the editor to support new languages (most times before you know about it!), port it to new platforms, and provide more plugins.

I guess there is a market for "easier" and more intuitive editors, but anyone who seriously plans a career in software/web development (or anything else that involves heavy text editing) will profit greatly (on the long term) from learning well one of these editors.

Vim never lets me down :)

Isnt $80 a bit too much? Since TextMate sells for $53, and editors which are better than both are basically free. :)

Just tried it, doesn't have the Mac look, drag control is laggy on my iMac.

I think I'll pass.

it does sort of look like it is aimed at windows diehards who are forced to use macs for some reason, doesn't it.

I think it looks like the creators of Ultra Edit don't think developing software for Mac is in any way different than for Windows; that Mac users don't expect other things from software than Windows users do.

For the uninformed Vim/Emacs die-hards like me...

What's so great about UltraEdit?

UltraEdit is to Windows what BBEdit is to MacOS.

I know, that doesn't add much to the conversation. :)

Indeed, as a long-time Emacs user (and vi before that), it was hard to read past "world's best text editor."

As a Vim die-hard who had ultra-edit as default text editor in my Windows box at work before I installed vim, I can only reply "nothing". It is significantly far from being the best text editor in the world.

Its main selling point is that it's better than Notepad.

Well... God chose Ultraedit: http://www.ultraedit.com/company/IDM_full_story.html

;)

Interesting that there are 3 prices for 3 platforms:

Windows: $59.95

Mac: $79.95 (intro pricing)

Linux: $49.95 (intro pricing)

Is there a SLIME equivalent for this editor? When I'm programming C++, there's not really any editor on Linux that's much better than a code formatter. But when I'm working in more civilized languages, I find I want more than just a text editor. That's the thing I love about emacs. For all its wonky glyph rendering and inability to deal with fonts in a rational manner, it's still one of the most truly extensible and modable editors available anywhere.

> The world's best text editor is now available for Mac!

Now this just shows guys never knew how to use Vim. Pass.

UltraEdit for Mac seems to prove that the mac feel has nothing to do with beeing all cocoa. This feels like a windows app written with mac frameworks. Courier default font, really?

Nothing to do with the quality of the app, but "IDM Computer Solutions, Inc." is a company name fail.

I liked UltraEdit back in my Windows days, but this story kind of put me off: http://www.ultraedit.com/company/IDM_full_story.html

So, he's a god botherer, don't judge him for that.

Judge him like a proper 'hacker' would, and that's by the quality of his products and his code.

Matz is Mormon (and he's Japanese, seriously what's with that!), and Jamis Buck is also a well known programmer who is very religious.

I'm not into god myself, but we're programmers and let's judge each other on our works, not our beliefs.

Well said!

Don't let good technology go to waste just because of the "weirdness" of the people behind it. It reminds me of the people who thought it horrible to use ReiserFS after what happened.

Firstly, I agree with you BUT this is not about judging the quality of the code, it is about giving money, since this isn't open source. The question is why you would directly give money to someone which you know have a disagreeable outlook, I wouldn't give money to a known pedophile or racist either. If she would've been an open source contributor I wouldn't care.

I only skimmed that "IDM story" page but found nothing which would make it appropriate to compare giving money to them with giving money to a pedophile or a racist. Did I miss something?

Since I clearly need to spell this out. What is appropriate is clearly subjective, I was taking it to the extreme in order to make a point. But I'll reiterate the same question. Why would you not disregard political or religious outlooks, or even crimes for that matter, when buying(i.e. giving money for) "stuff" from "vendor"?

I don't know if you'd get very far if you only traded with people with the same political beliefs as you, and would wager that nearly everyone you trade with is guilty of breaking some law on the books at some level.

I completely and utterly disagree with your comments, but if you were selling something useful to me, I'd consider it like any other product on the market.

They are just examples of things he disagrees with, and not meant as a comparison. But yes, there are probably better examples in this context.

The point is that you don't have to support people you disagree with.

This. But I should probably thank him, because after reading that I searched and found an editor that suited me better and was Open Source. :)

The largest file I have to hand is the hacked Gawker database. (~75MB) Let's see how SubEthaEdit does with it concatenated with itself 6 times? (450MB)

Hmm, it never seems to open a window from that, though it remains responsive. (I can still open other files.)

Good old gedit can read the 450MB file handily, after a few seconds delay.

Aquamacs (Aqua emacs) asks me if I'm sure I want to open the file, then when I press Ok, it tells me it's too large to open a few seconds later.

If you just want to open a very large file with a GUI text editor, just continue to use your editor of choice, then download gedit for the very large files. It's small, respectably multi-platform, and free in both senses.

EDIT: Downmodded for reporting facts! Nice one, HN!

I don't think you're being downvoted for reporting facts. The article was about an editor that you're not even mentioning. And on top of that, what you're talking about is very obscure. Why would I ever want to open a 450mb file in a text-editor?

What tipped you off to start talking about large files in a thread about UltraEdit?

EDIT: Just saw the thread about large files further down. Maybe you meant to make a reply?

Back when I was working on the VS editor team, we had to worry about things like users opening multiple-gigabyte XML files in the editor, expecting text to immediately display, and for the little scroll nubbie to immediately size to the correct proportional size (the size of the nub is proportional to the number of lines displayed in the window versus the overall number of lines in the file, with some thresholding). And be able to start clicking immediately on the scroll bar, expand/collapse regions, etc.

It's a hard problem that requires pretty serious engineering, especially when your user expectations are that you should be at least as fast as emacs and vim, but also support all of your other features.

And yes, people open large files all the time. Log files; autogenerated "component configuration" babble; registry text dumps; debugging diagnostic output...

UltraEdit is discussed below as the only text editor that can open 500MB files.

Who is this app meant for? Windows converts who haven't discovered Textmate, Sublime, or BBEdit?

Well, it's passing as a 'Notepad Replacement' in its Product page..

ultraedit is the only text editor i could find that can open a 500mb ASCII file without problems.

What ist with vim and Emacs? Did you try them? I loaded files bigger than 1 GB with them - but this was on Windows.

When do you need to actually open and edit a 500 mb ascii file instead of just processing it with one of the many Unix command line tools that can handle a 500 mb file just fine? (I realize it hypothetically does happen, the question refers to frequency.)

XYZ files from Multibeam surveys. Windows user. Sometimes I need to look at the contents of the file - EG: remove x number of "headers" from the ASCII file.

when you are on windows?

There are alternatives to UNIX command line tools available on Windows (such as Powershell, for example), as well as ports of them (Cygwin etc). An editor as a replacement for those isn't really the best way to go.

I just tried a 1.1 gig file with MacVim and didn't have any issues.

I suspect that BBEdit (http://barebones.com/products/bbedit/) wouldn't have a problem with a 500mb file.

BBEdit beach balled for about 30 minutes on my 7 million line, 500 meg test file, before I gave up and killed it.

I think everyone is talking in Mac context here. It's more laggy than Textmate when I open a 500-line-file. Unfortunately I don't have 500MB ASCII file to test.

Textmate freezes when I try to open any big file, like 50MB. Sucks. Otherwise great.

Grab the free version of Visual Studio (Express).

look up "thegun" editor (windows)

Whatttt, my mind is blown