BlueFish is a free and open source text editor supporting a wide range of languages, multiple document interface, powerful search tools, in-line checking and auto-recovery, and other features.
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UltraEdit
Score 9.2 out of 10
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UltraEdit is a text editor from IDM Computer Solutions headquartered in Hamilton.
It is perfectly suited for most markup and programming languages, much better than Text docs, but it is not ideal for anyone who'd like a visual editor.
Overall, a great tool for handling large files. Code formatting is very nice and customizable making it very easy to write scripts or SQL or any other language. It is easy to navigate and it remembers files and keeps them in context when shut down and relaunched. My analysts and programmers all use this editor every day.
Easily found and downloaded. If I need someone to go to the web and grab it I can tell them the URL. It is easily installed and one can be edited in minutes.
BlueFish is easy to use. It can have a non-technical user use it to edit config files or text documents and not have them frustrated. It has a friendly straight forward user interface.
BlueFish does a really good job editing HTML documents specifically. Probably one of the best HTML editors left out there.
There are WYSIWYG Open alternatives, some of which work perfectly as an Open version of Dreamweaver, but the only suggestion I would have is that Bluefish add a WYSIWYG tab, e.g. code/visual.
As a program UltraEdit comes ready to use out of the box and requires very little setup for it to be extremely useful. It's flexibility among a wide array of tasks and files makes it a go-to for all our troubleshooting and data viewing needs. Timely updates and great support.
As with most GNU GPL products support is top-notch. Documentation is fantastic, all functions are documented. Also, this product has been around for more than a decade so there is lots of stuff on how to do this or that with this tool. The only thing holding you back from support is your own drive to find a solution. RTFM, my friend.
BBEdit is fantastic but it costs money. Frankly, BBEdit is not worth paying for. All you are doing is paying old software and I have a problem asking people to do that. Also, BBEdit is limited to the small Mac Universe. Likewise, Notepadd++ is only found on Windows but I much better than BBEdit. Finally, there is Atom. I like Atom a bunch because it has a lot more functionality than BlueFish. Atom is a better code editor than BlueFish. Also, the Atom interface is a bit confusing to the new user.
I have evaluated Notepad++ as an alternative to UltraEdit. In some cases, such as loading time, Notepad++ is a superior product. However, in terms of editing existing macros, and editing very large text files UltraEdit is a much better product.
