UltraEdit Frequently Asked Questions

Access to previous versions of UltraEdit (and our other applications) is currently only available through email. Please email us at [email protected] with your most current license information, and we will provide you with the version you are eligible for.

As of UltraEdit v24.20.0.40 and UEStudio v17.20.0.10, you can delete blank lines by going to the Edit tab and clicking Delete » Delete all empty lines.

As of UltraEdit v24.20.0.40 and UEStudio v17.20.0.10, you can delete all empty and whitespace lines by going to the Edit tab and clicking Delete » Delete all empty and whitespace-only lines.

UltraEdit only converts the file if it is edited and then saved. Also, if you have “Save file as input format” selected in Settings, the conversion is overridden on save.

The primary purpose behind the automatic/dialog-prompt conversion on file open is to allow the Windows clipboard to function properly. With conversion enabled, a copy or cut operation will include DOS line endings (0D 0A), which allows for seamless use of Unix/Mac files in a DOS environment. The easiest way to get intuitive behavior is to disable the “Save file as input format” option.

You can access this setting by going to Advanced » Settings » File Handling » DOS/Unix/Mac Handling. Select “Unix” as the “Default file type for new files”.

Usually this is because the “Regular expressions” checkbox has been left checked in the Find box. If regular expressions have been enabled, the default behavior of F3 is overridden so you can continue to use F3 with a regular expression which may match and highlight many different words.

To prevent this behavior, open the Find dialog, uncheck “Regular expressions,” then click “Next” to save the search setting. F3 should now work as you expect.

Go to Advanced » Settings » File handling » Miscellaneous and ensure that “Create new Edit file when opening with no other files” is not selected.

Go to Advanced » Settings » File Types. Here you can configure the filter of file types that appear in the “Open” and “Save as” dialogs. You can set up to 10 file types, and each may have multiple extensions (separated by a semicolon).

Regarding large files, UltraEdit handles huge files with no theoretical size limit. UltraEdit is disk based. This means it only loads small portions of the file at once into memory so it does not use all the memory and stop other applications from running. However, it does make a temporary copy of the file to achieve this and this can take time for large files.

As of UltraEdit v2023.1, you can enable large file mode by setting the file size threshold and choosing which features are disabled to save valuable system resources for large files by navigating to Advanced » Settings » File handling » Large files.

For all previous versions, there are several options you can change to optimize the handling of large files. More information is available at our large file handling power tip.

The recommended way of doing this is by going to Advanced » Backup settings » Backup/Restore User Customizations.

Go to File » Print » Print setup » Page setup. Here you will see an option to “Print syntax highlighting”.

You can select large blocks with Select » Select range in the Edit tab. Additionally, here are a couple of methods for making this easier. If you position your click at the beginning of a block of text and move to the end of the block using the scrollbar, then press Shift and click at the end of the block, the entire block will be selected.

Alternatively, you could click at the beginning of the block to be selected and, if there is unique text at the end of your block, you could do a Find. When you click Next, hold the Shift key and all text between the current cursor position and end of the found text will be selected.

One solution is to use the “Delete lines containing string” script, available for download on our scripts page.

You can also replace lines containing a string with a Perl regular expression replace. Press Ctrl + R to open the Replace dialog. Check the “Regular expressions” option and ensure “Perl” is selected in the drop down beneath. Set the “Find what” string to:

^.*YOUR_STRING.*\r?\n?

…and leave “Replace with” empty. Click Replace all to delete all lines containing “YOUR_STRING”.

Learn more about Perl regular expressions

When a file is loaded UltraEdit checks the first 7K of the file, and if it contains more than two hex nulls (hex 00 byte) the file is considered a binary (non-text) file. Nulls are not valid in plain text files, and so UltraEdit will open the file in hex mode. You can prevent this behavior by going to Advanced » Settings » Editor » Hex mode and unchecking “Open files containing hex 00’s (nulls) in hex mode”.

Go to Edit » Copy selected (in the “Hex mode” group) to do this.

Go to Advanced » Settings » Editor Display » Formatting and ensure that “Break on hyphen (-) when converting/reformatting paragraphs” is not selected.

The ruler works as a normal ruler would, showing 0 as the start point, allowing the user to measure the number of columns prior to a given point. The status bar, on the other hand, is intended to show the column in which you’re about to make an entry. As with normal Windows applications, both of these modes of indication and measurement are the standard way of doing things, however most applications do not include both.

If you prefer to have the ruler begin with 1 rather than 0, go to Advanced » Settings » Editor Display » Miscellaneous and select “Start ruler numbering at column 1”.

This is typically related to backup creation. To prevent this, go to Advanced » Configuration » File Handling » Advanced and check “Copy file instead of using rename when creating backup file”.

Go to Layout » Themes » Manage themes. Click the “Editor” tab in the “Manage themes” dialog and uncheck “Enable active line highlighting.”

To add different fonts and styles for different portions of text in your file would require that the font/style information be saved in the text file with the data. UltraEdit is a plain text editor and does not add any additional information like this to the file. This is within the scope of a word processor like MS Word, but not a plain text editor.

Typically when this happens, the user has inadvertently activated one of the user clipboards without realizing it. UltraEdit supports multiple clipboards, and the clipboards are activated from the Edit menu, right-click (context) menu or via Ctrl+0 – Ctrl+9, with Ctrl+0 being the standard (Windows) clipboard. The other 9 clipboards will work only in UltraEdit.

The active clipboard is shown in the status bar following the line/col separated by a comma. C0 reflects the Windows Clipboard and C1-9 the user clipboards.

If you find that this is happening a lot, you can remove the Ctrl+# key mapping assignments for the user clipboards by going to Advanced » Settings » Key mapping and removing the existing assignments for User Clipboard 1 through User Clipboard 9.

It is not currently possible to switch languages within the application. If you decide you’d like to use a different language version of UltraEdit, you would need to do the following:

1. Uninstall UltraEdit
2. Delete the full content of the %APPDATA%\IDMComp\UltraEdit folder
3. Download and install a different language version of UltraEdit

The easiest way to find commands/settings in UltraEdit is to press CTRL+SHIFT+P to display the Command Palette. You can then type a search term to show a listing of all related commands or settings.