1) Open Advanced - Configuration - Editor Display - Syntax Highlighting. There you can see which text file contains the syntax highlighting definitions for various languages. Press the button Open to open that file and close the dialog with button Cancel.

I guess, you see the standard wordfile.txt in the UltraEdit program directory. The first definition is for "C/C++" which has 4 color groups: /C1"Keywords", /C2"C++ Keywords", /C3"Microsoft C extensions" and /C4"Operators". UltraEdit supports up to 8 color groups.

Lets say you want to have different colors for () {} and [] for "C/C++" files. Then add following after last word of group /C4"Operators" at the first language definition:

/C5"Brackets"
[
]
/C6"Braces"
{
}
/C7"Parenthesis"
(
)

After this modification you best save the file with Save As to a new name like mysyntaxdefinitions.txt. Wordfile.txt is on UltraEdit updates also updated. So it is a good advice to don't use the standard wordfile when it is customized for your needs.

Open again Advanced - Configuration - Editor Display - Syntax Highlighting and browse for the just saved new syntax highlighting wordfile. Then select the language where you have made the modification like "C/C++" for my example. Now you can select one after the other the 2 new color groups and specify the color and style settings you want for the 3 type of braces.

For more info read the big page about Syntax Highlighting in help of UltraEdit from top to bottom.


2) It is not possible to insert characters like a space without cursor movement. You know that key HOME by default moves the cursor to first non white-space character on a line except the cursor is currently exactly on first non white-space character. That can be changed with the setting Home Key always Goto column 1. But in your case it could be helpful with the default setting (= not enabled).

In column mode when pasting text the cursor position on the current line does not change. I use that trick sometimes to make what you do for a text. You could select a space character, copy it to clipboard with Ctrl+C, switch to column mode with Alt+C and insert the space with Ctrl+V as often as you want without change of the column. Don't forget to switch back to normal text edit mode with Alt+C when finished with inserting spaces.

In colum mode there are more nice features like Insert/Fill Columns, Insert Number, Delete Columns and Cut Columns. The help of UltraEdit has more informations about that simple but often very useful functions. And with hotkeys I use it frequently.

Last you could create a macro which contains only 3 lines:

InsertMode
" "
Key LEFT ARROW

and assign a hotkey like Alt+SPACE to this macro. When you now save this macro into a macro file which is specified to be automatically loaded on startup of UltraEdit, you can insert with Alt+SPACE a space character without visible change of the cursor position.