UltraEdit

UltraEdit is an MS-Windows editor for data and programming. It is particularly useful for handling large data files and for column-oriented data entry operations. It is available in a 16-bit version for Windows 3.x and a 32-bit version for Windows 95. The features of both products are nearly identical.

UltraEdit contains many useful features for creating numerical data files and for programming. A brief list is included below. Many of these capabilities may be invoked via "hot keys" (a sequence of keys pressed at one time) or by clicking the right mouse-button.

UltraEdit is equipped with a number of advanced search abilities, including:

• Find
  • Find next
  • Find previous
  • Find within column (see Column Mode below)
  • Find in file (similar to grep in UNIX)
• Replace
  • Replace all
    • from top of file
    • from current cursor position
    • for entire file
    • for selected text
  • Prompted replace
  • Replace in files

UltraEdit supports a number of file sorting options, including:

• Order
  • Ascending
  • Descending
• Column . . .
  • of current cursor position
  • designated by number
• Duplicate removal
• Case sensitivity

To run a Sort,

• Select the File pulldown menu
• Select Sort
  • Choose Sort File (Using Current Options), or
  • Choose Advanced Sort/Options.
    • Edit the appropriate options.
    • Click Sort.

The data should now be sorted according to your specifications.

You can insert the contents of one file into the file you are currently editing. To do this,

• Put the cursor at the beginning of the line where you want the file inserted.
• Select the File / Special / Insert File menu items.
• From the dialog box, choose the file you want to insert and click Open.

NOTE: The file is actually inserted one line above where you place the cursor.

TIP:

Note that the file being imported may have some of its formatting altered. For example, inserting some source code (e.g., Fortran, C)into the top of, say, the columnar numeric output file it created will cause the source code to lose its formatting and become one long line of codes, tab stops and special characters.

1. The easiest solution is to try reversing the roles - insert File B into File A instead of File A into File B. In the above example, if you insert the output into the source code, the formatting remains correct. You may need to experiment a bit to get this right.
2. Another possibility is to try to clean up the results using some of the formatting features (Format menu), such as Reformat Paragraph and Convert CR/LF's to Wrap. This approach will probably require quite a bit of work.

Macros provide a means of automating small, specialized procedures that you may frequently perform. For example, macros could automate a search-and-replace operation used often.

Macros in UltraEdit work much like macros in Excel and many other applications. Rather than requiring you to program the functions and operations directly, the macro editor allows you to record the sequence of keystrokes and locators that are used to perform a task, and assign that sequence to a single keystroke combination (e.g., CTRL-SHIFT-F1). Whenever you want to do perform that operation, all you have to do is press the appropriate combination of keys.

Macros may

Hot key selection

UltraEdit can be thought of as existing in two modes: line mode and column mode. When performing deletions, jumps, searches, replacements, etc., you must tell UltraEdit in which mode to conduct these operations. The default is line mode. To toggle column mode, select Column / Column Mode from the pulldown menu. If you return to this menu, you will see that the options that were previously grayed out are now available.

In column mode you can:

• Insert/fill columns: Allows you to insert a text or numeric string at a user-specified column, starting at a user-specified line.
• Delete columns
• Cut columns
• Insert numbers: Generates line numbers in the actual document instead of just the editor, but may have other uses.
• Perform searches and replacements on selected columns:
  
  NOTE: UltraEdit cannot currently perform prompted search and replace in column mode.

WARNING: Column mode affects several aspects of UltraEdit's operation, even disabling certain ones (e.g., Edit / Delete Line). It is usually wise to toggle column mode off when you are finished working in it. To do this, select Column / Column Mode.

UltraEdit features a number of ways to open multiple windows of data at once. They are all available under the Window pulldown menu.

Tabs (default)	Tile Horizontal	Tile Vertical	Cascade

To return to the default display, click on the

maximize button

at the top right corner of the window you want maximized.

In going from one platform to another, it is sometimes necessary to convert the formatting of your data file, or to be able to view your documents in hexadecimal for debugging. It is also helpful to be able to convert line feeds (LF) and carriage returns (CR) to line wrapping and vice-versa and to be able to trim trailing spaces. UltraEdit supports all of these features.

Supported conversions (two-way):

• UNIX <==> DOS
• MAC <==> DOS
• OEM <==> ANSI
• ASCII <==> EBCDIC

How to . . .

Perform conversions

To perform any of these conversions pulldown, choose the File / Conversions pulldown menu item. The OEM to ANSI conversion is mostly used for converting DOS format to Windows format. EBCDIC is the file format for IBM mainframes.

Hex edit

Enter hex edit mode by choosing Edit / Hex Edit from the pulldown menu, or press CTRL-H.

Convert line feeds & carriage returns to wrapping

Choose Convert CR/LF's to Wrap or Convert Wrap to CR/LF's (whichever is appropriate) from the Format pulldown menu.

Trim trailing spaces

Choose Format / Trim Trailing Spaces from the pulldown menu.

UltraEdit permits you to define a series of words and characters that will be used to color-code the contents of a file. Assigning special colors to certain words helps discern the organization of the file contents. This is especially useful to programmers writing and editing code.

UltraEdit's color coding is based on instructions located in a file called WORDFILE.TXT. This file is comprised of six "slots", each one containing instructions for one type of file; each slot may be replaced with another at any time. The instructions in the WORDFILE slots tell UltraEdit

• how to recognize what kind of file has been loaded (typically based on file name extension)
• which words in that file to highlight.

Many programming languages are based on sets of words that share the same basic function; for example, four common sets are statements, strings, declarations, and comments. While UltraEdit does not support functional highlighting per se, it is possible to achieve the equivalent effect by creating a WORDFILE class that represents all of the instances of that function. In other words, you cannot tell UltraEdit to color all of the declarations blue, but you can give it every example of a declaration statement in your programming language and tell it to color-code those words.

Each WORDFILE set may be configured to display a different color for each of the following groups of words:

• Five groups (keyword categories) of different recognized words
• Words that appear in a comment line (denoted by certain characters)
• Normal text (words that are not recognized).

To recapitulate: there is one WORDFILE, which supports six formatting slots; for example, slot 1 could be used for C++ syntax, slot 2 for Fortran, etc. Each slot, supports five keyword categories to be highlighted, plus comments and normal text.

The file extension determines which slot in the WORDFILE will be used by UltraEdit in deciding which keywords to highlight in the open file. Below is an example of the format code from a slot that recognizes the file extensions C, CPP, H, HPP, and AWK to highlight C and C++ code. In the following example, /C1 marks the beginning of the first keyword group, /C2 marks the beginning of the second, etc. Each group is assigned a different color.

/L1"C/C++" Line Comment = // Block Comment On = /* Block Comment Off = */ String Chars = "' File Extensions = C CPP H HPP AWK /Delimiters = ~!@%^&*()-+=|\/{}[]:;"'<> , .?
/C1
auto
break
case char const continue
...
__asm __fastcall __self __segment __based __segname __fortran __cdecl __huge __far __saveregs __export __pascal __near __loadds __interrupt __inline #define #error #include #elif #if #line #else #ifdef #pragma #endif #ifndef #undef
/C2
class
...
virtual
__multiple_inheritance __single_inheritance __virtual_inheritance

Based on these instructions, UltraEdit produces the following color-coding of a C++ file:

UltraEdit features the ability to execute DOS commands and capture their output automatically. This has a variety of applications, but it primarily useful for compiling programs. To spawn a DOS command,

A dialog box is presented in the DOS Command box that allows the command line to be specified. This should be the full path of the file to be executed, unless

• it is a system command (such as DIR)
• it is in the Windows directory
• it is in the Windows / System directory

Wildcards and Sequences

The DOS command can be constructed so that the active file's name is passed to the program to be executed. For example:

You set up a command to run a compiler and you want to invoke the compiler with the file you are currently editing. If you change files you want the compiler to be invoked with the new file. For example, suppose the compiler is C:\comp\compiler.

Specify the following command in the dialog box:

C:\comp\compiler %F

When the command is executed, the %F will be replaced by the full directory path, filename and extension of the active window, The file will be saved before the command is executed.

The following commands may be used to pass a portion of the fully qualified filename:

• %P Path only ("C:\project\test\")
• %N File_Name only ("test")
• %E Extension only (".c")

%P%N%E is equal to %F which is "C:\project\test\test.c" in the example above.

NOTE - If the %f, %p, %n, or %e are typed in lower case the file names are passed as long file names and should be put in quotation marks, (e.g., "%f" or "%p%n" ) . If the %F, %P, %N, %E are typed in upper case the file name and path will be converted and passed as the "8.3" short filename specification for compatibility with DOS programs.

A working directory is only supported by UltraEdit-32. The working directory should be the full path of the working directory, or left blank if not required.

Additional notes:

Output from a DOS program is sometimes saved in a temporary location by the operating system. Therefore spawning a DOS command from UltraEdit may not work correctly with a program that requires interaction while it is executing. For example, prompts may not appear on the screen at the correct time and you may wonder why there is no activity. The output will always be captured. Thus, if the program generates no screen output, then the captured output may indeed be empty (and UltraEdit will therefore show an empty window).