Before you start modifying a toolbar, it is advisable to either store the entire layout (formerly known environment) with a custom name using
View - Layouts - Manage Layouts, or open
Advanced - Configuration - Toolbars / Menus - Management, click on button
Manage toolbars, and save current toolbar with a different name. The toolbar management dialog can be opened also via right click on a toolbar and left click on
Manage Toolbar Configurations. It is advisable on using a customized toolbar to use also a customized layout or at least a customized toolbar profile file to avoid an overwrite of the customized toolbar on future updates of UltraEdit. UltraEdit updates only the standard layout files, but not custom files which means for English UE Advanced.*, Balanced.*, Clean.* and Multi-Window.* in directory of used INI file which is by default
uedit32.ini stored by default in
%APPDATA%\IDMComp\UltraEdit.
The HTML toolbar is an extra feature for the HTML page writers.
You could use the 23 custom HTML commands as well as some predefined HTML commands for BBCode tag adding by opening
Advanced - Configuration - Toolbars / Menus - HTML Toolbar, changing the HTML tags to BBCode tags, assign your own images, and customize the HTML toolbar accordingly with including a toolbar renaming to BBCode. All the HTML toolbar commands are available in the toolbar customization dialog, and the predefined ones also in key mapping configuration dialog for inserting by key. But if you are using the HTML toolbar already, this might not be the solution for you.
You have 2 other options to quickly insert BBCode tags around a selected text or insert a BBCode tag and continue writing between them.
The first one is the usage of the tag list opened with
View - Views/Lists - Tag List. The tag list view can be docked with auto-hide feature enabled, or the visibility is toggled by key or toolbar command. The default tag list file
%APPDATA%\IDMComp\UltraEdit\taglist.uet does not contain a tag list group for BBCode. But on extra downloads page
Tags & Autocomplete there is a tag list file for BBCode which can be added to tag list file or replace the tag list file. The tags are modified best within UltraEdit by right clicking into the tag list view and click on single context menu item
Modify Tags. It is of course also possible to use a completely different tag list file as the default one which is advisable on having it customized to avoid a silent replacement of modified
taglist.uet on first run of UltraEdit after an upgrade to a newer version.
It is not possible to add tags from the tag list to a toolbar as a toolbar can contain only commands.
The other method is to create a language template file for BBCode and use the
smart templates feature. Open
View - Views/Lists - Template List, right click into this list view and click on
Modify Templates in context menu. At top right corner select language BBCode from template list group. Now you can define your templates.
Example:
Template name:
bold
Template content:
[ b][$replace$]^[ /b]
Template description:
Format text bold
Note: Please remove twice the space after
[ just added here to get the two BBCode bold tags not parsed as BBCode tags.
Click on button
Help in
Modify Templates dialog for details on
[$replace$] (selected text if there is a text selected) and
^ (position of caret after inserting the template).
While the language templates can be inserted via template list view, using auto-complete (Ctrl+Space or automatic) or the smart templates feature, there are 2 more possibilities if adding the BBCode tags to
global templates instead of a language templates file.
The first 50
global templates can be inserted also by hotkey/chord as at
Advanced - Configuration - Key Mapping there are the commands
InsertTemplate0 to
InsertTemplate49 offered for hotkey/chord (multi-key) assignment.
And the toolbar customization dialog contains the commands
User Template 0 to
User Template 9 for being added to a toolbar with a custom image for inserting the global templates 0 to 9.
In real the commands for inserting the first 50 global templates via toolbar can be added to a BBCode toolbar. The toolbar customization dialog just lists the first 10 user template commands. But the toolbar profile file is a simple text file which can be modified by the user. Therefore the commands
ID_INSERTTEMP10 to
ID_INSERTTEMP49 can be also added to a toolbar. The active toolbar profile file is by default
%APPDATA%\IDMComp\UltraEdit\uedit32.tb0 which is a copy of
layout name.tb1 or
toolbar name.tb1. Both files must be manually edited for example with Notepad while UltraEdit is not running when more the commands for inserting the global templates 10 to 49 should be added to a BBCode toolbar.
I hope, this was not too much for you.