First, options to launch UC Lite in UE is useless, whatever I choose text mode or binary mode, it doesn't have effect in UC.

Second, use text mode to compare two binary files, UC will report "UTF-8 can't convert..." and the two files will be modified. I think I only want to compare, but why it will modify the files? Even if there's no change after modification, it shouldn't modify the files without prompt.

The two problems exist in several editions and also in the latest version.

There are cases when a file opened in UE is opened at the same time in another app, and UE claims the file was modified and prompts whether to reload it (if the appropriate option is enabled) no matter that the file was not actually modified.
Looks like sometimes UE treats a file as modified when it was just accessed, without any modifications. But this is a harmless bug, it doesn't matter whether you'll choose to reload or not.

Thank you for the reply.

The bug is not always harmless. It will change the modified time of file. Sometimes, I rely on the modified time attribute to distinguish different version of files.

yzkzero wrote:First, options to launch UC Lite in UE is useless, whatever i choose text mode or binary mode, it doesn't have effect in UC.

You are right. ALL compare options are not applied to UltraCompare Lite when running it from UltraEdit v12.10a or UEStudio v6.00. But the compare options are perfectly used with UltraCompare Professional which I and I think also all IDM developers have installed.

I looked into this problem and detected that the compare options are applied via the appropriate command line options. But UCL does not support command line options. So UltraEdit and UEStudio should set the compare option settings in the registry for UCL to avoid running UCL always with the same default options and ignoring the user options. The compare options for UCL are stored in the registry at

HKCU\Software\IDM Computer Solutions\UltraCompare\Settings

Current version 4.00a of UltraCompare Professional stores it's settings at

HKCU\Software\IDM Computer Solutions\UltraCompare Pro 3\UltraCompare\Settings

So UE and UES should either modify the compare options in the registry for UCL or use the command line options for UC Professional.

Also wrong in the UE/UES compare files dialog is that the compare method Smart Binary is not disabled because it is not available in the Lite version.

I have now written a problem report email about these 2 issues with UCL to IDM support which looks like nobody else has done before and reactivated my UltraCompare Professional.

Edited on 2006-11-09: The problems with the not working parameter and options passing to UCL and the not disabled Smart Binary compare method are fixed with UCL v4.10a+1 and UE v12.20a+2 and UES v6.10a+2.

yzkzero wrote:Second, use text mode to compare two binary files, UC will report "UTF-8 can't convert..." and the two files will be modified.

Well, I never compared binary files in text mode and will never do it. You currently have the problem that UCL always uses the text mode. So a workaround for this problem till a fixed version of UltraEdit is released would be maybe to set the hex value of

HKCU\Software\IDM Computer Solutions\UltraCompare\Settings\Mode

once to the value 1 to set the binary mode as default compare mode. This hopefully avoids the file time modification problem. You can switch in UCL to text mode if the files are text files.

But I agree that changing the last modification time of a file without a real modification is really bad. I also synchronize my computers daily and such a file time handling would annoy me too.

I have not looked and will not look into what is going on when 2 binary files are compared by mistake or a bug of UE/UES in text mode. You can use the free tool Filemon from SysInternals to look into it and then write a bug report email to IDM support (see email address at top of this page).

If nobody tells the IDM developers about bugs, they can't fix it.