A lot of people decide to buy FrontPage when they decide to start authoring websites, because they see it advertised everywhere. Whether on TV, in magazines, and the Internet, HTML editors are everywhere. Although there are good WYSIWYG editors, I still advise learning HTML and using Notepad to create and edit pure source code. Most people feel editing your site in a text editor will provide for a better and faster loading site. Of course typing source code in Notepad basically offers nothing else than plain text editing.
There are many programs that offer more functionality than Notepad while still being considered pure text editors. UltraEdit 32 is a so-called Notepad replacement, because it offers the same basic functions and then adds new functionality. What I like a lot is that I started the application as fast as Notepad.
Ultra Edit has a very user-friendly interface. It offers a tree structure on the left, which shows you all files that are open at the moment or you can browse disks, CD’s or harddrives to open a file. The menu on the top gives you access to important actions, such as copy, paste, cut, find and replace, or open the current file in the standard browser (I like that feature a lot when I work on a website and want to know what it looks like.) There is also a lot more if you dive into the menu structure. There is an advanced macro option, a spellchecker, which supports English and additional languages (spellchecker for other languages can be downloaded from the official website.), a hex converter, and several ways to format your document.
UltraEdit contains a HEX editor, programming editor, and a plain text editor all combined in one. Its toolbar is intuitive, probably because it’s not cluttered. Most features are accessible from the menu options instead of the buttons. It has a powerful Find and Replace function, allowing you to make changes to multiple documents and directories. Also, UltraEdit supports multiple files, so you don’t have to keep loading up files one at a time. Its Undo function is perfect, allowing to Undo things that you messed up very far back in the document. However, probably one of the most useful features in UltraEdit is its color tags. All text is black, tags are bright blue, and attributes are red, while comments are light blue. This helps to keep track of things in long HTML documents. I thought that UltraEdit was a very useful program, so useful, that well, I’m using it!
I am not finished yet. There is built-in ability to open document from FTP sites, save to FTP sites, and convert files from DOS to Mac and UNIX. Besides using Ultra Edit to work on HTML, it’s the perfect text editor for all kinds of scripting. CGI, Javascript, and practically any scripting language. Its very advanced syntax highlighting will come in handy while working with the tool. This is by far my favorite tool to write scripts and HTML and if you do webpages hardcore, you should really get Ultra Edit 32.
