The really big question about UEStudio...

So, earlier this week, I finally took the plunge and bought UEStudio. So here is my question: "Why in the world did I wait so long to try this program?!?"

I have been using UltraEdit since version 5. I have always been pleased with it. I have tried many editors, but always came back to UltraEdit because it has always been the superior choice.

However, I have always been reluctant to spend money on UEStudio. I believed that UltraEdit served every possible need I had and that for the work I do UEStudio would just be a lot of unneeded features so I did not want to spend the extra money on it. All I can say is, it was well worth the money!

I have been taking time off from work to go through the UEStudio Feature tour to get a handle on all the new features and see how they can help me to be more productive. I must say, this is time well spent. Considering a programmer is always having to "go back to school" for new language versions, new frameworks, new standards, etc., this is educational time well spent.

Let me give everyone some advice... If you haven't done so already, take some time to really sit down and explore all the features of UltraEdit or UEStudio. See how each feature can be used to help you be more productive. You may not need every feature, but you might need to know it's there, because there may come a day where you do need it. As a developer, I spend most of my day in my editor/IDE. It's what I literally spend most of my time with. I spend more time with my editor/IDE more than I see my wife during the work week. It's good to get to know it better, if you're going to be spending a lot of time with it.

Ok, so I really created this thread for a rant on why I didn't try this fabulous product sooner, and to thank IDM for another marvelous product. For my next birthday, I'll be asking for a gift of more IDM products, like UltraCompare Professional, and maybe lifetime upgrades for UEStudio. Awesome.

Next step, I'm going to try to program a wrapper/container to allow me to put UEStudio on my USB drive like I did for UltraEdit. I simply don't think I should leave home without it.

Since I began this topic some years ago, I have retired from programming full-time. During the last 2 years, I haven't even had time during my retirement to even play around as a hobby with it.

While I did, at one point in time, use UEStudio instead of Visual Studio without any issues whatsoever, I really am unable to compare the most recent versions of both to be able to adequately answer your questions. It may very well depend on exactly what type of coding you are doing or what type of project you are working on.

What I would suggest is what I originally did, if you have the time to spare. Download the free trial for UEStudio and explore the features and capabilities. Compare what you can do with the current version of Visual Studio. The latest version of UEStudio (15.1) has the Document Map feature which is rather nice, as is the new Git integration built in.

Good point on conversion of projects. I didn't think about that, because I never converted. I always started all projects with UES to begin with, and since I didn't work in a team that had already started a VS project, it was never an issue, as I never needed the project conversion.

I did use UES with VS 2013, but you have to set up the Compiler Configuration file yourself, which can be a bit tedious and even difficult for the first time user. Since I had already set up compiler configuration files for several other languages that were not supported, I had already learned how to do this. Been a long time, though, and I've pretty much forgotten it. I don't think I've really used UEStudio or UltraEdit either one for anything other than editing a simple text file in well over a year now. Haven't done any programming in at least a year and a half, so I'm afraid I won't be able to help with that.

But, yeah, like netizensmith said, the code parser in UES helped me to work more efficiently than in VS. As a matter of fact, a lot of things helped me to work more efficiently while doing the actual coding, which was 95% of the job. Compiling was faster from within UES on really large projects by just a bit if I recall correctly. Didn't have to wait on the VS to call the compiler, which I think was the issue, since they were both calling the same compiler file. I think I only used VS when needing to set up the UI layout for a Win32 program, or if needing to debug with an emulator for another type of device (non-PC).

I used Delphi 2010 way back when, and it was painfully slow to use. The IDE was rather complete in everything it did, but UES beat it and was so much faster and easier to use, I still used UES to even do the compiling. Using the same compiler, Delphi 2010 might take just over 2 minutes to compile a project that UES would do in under 30 seconds. I never understood that one. The Delphi 2010 IDE would want to scan your code for errors before compiling, when there is a compiler switch to do the same.