I'm a brand new user of UE but a long time SPFPC user (career mainframe IBM'er). Does anyone have any experience with the two and can you give me your un-biased (realizing this is a UE forum) pro's and con's.
I'm just wondering if it is worth the learning curve, or should I buy my own copy of SPFPC so that I can be productive quicker for this employer. 99% of my job is COBOL / MF COBOL / JCL / etc.
I've never used SPFPC so can't comment on it, however I do have 23 odd years and counting MF experience so am very familiar with ISPF edit. I now use UE and UES for most of my MF coding work which consists mainly of z/OS assembler and C.
UE can be configured to recognize different language types based on the file extension. It will apply syntax highlight for each language type, and for column dependent languages such as assembler, COBOL, JCL etc you can define your tab stops so that you can move across to the correct position as required. UE has a column editing mode which is very similar to the block operations possible in ISPF allowing you to overlay multiple lines with selected data. The search (and replace) in multiple files is similar to ISPF option 3.14, with the obvious additional replace capability. UE allows you to exclude or hide blocks of lines and then delete the whole hidden block. I will do conversion between ASCII and EBCDIC and it is capable of doing EBCDIC hex edit.
I'm not sure what the file management capabilities referred to in SPFPC are, but UES has built in support for CVS and SVN version control. The built in FTP client allows you to quickly transfer files to and from your MF host, as it has support for an MVS FTP server.
I have used both SPFPC and UltraEdit. UltraEdit is a better editor, period. SPFPC has been shoehorned into the PC environment, and does not perform naturally in it. UltraEdit can be configured to have syntax highlighting akin to the mainframe, so no loss there. The best feature of UltraEdit, like other PC-based editors, is to be able to have multiple files open in a tabbed environment, something SPFPC does not have.
Although I licensed, installed, and used SPF/PC many years ago, I don't think you could drag me, kicking and screaming, back to it now. Nevertheless, there were features, such as column mode, that I found either missing or wanting in most of the text editors that run in Microsoft Windows. That is, until I started using UltraEdit in September 2009. Pretty soon, I quit searching for a better editor, and purchased a lifetime of upgrades for UltraEdit and UltraCompare.
After a few years, I gave up on SPF/PC. Not only is it shoehorned into a PC, but it always felt sluggish, no matter how much CPU horsepower I threw at it. Whenever I used it for a task that seemed best suited for SPF/PC, I felt like I had regressed to a monochrome 3270 terminal (not even the 3278 color terminal).
Any time you change programs or programming tools, there is a learning curve, and I won't mislead you by saying that you will make the transition overnight. Nevertheless, I think you'll be happy that you did, once you get accustomed to UltraEdit. I cannot think of a single feature of SPF/PC that it can't match or exceed, and it brings many powerful features, some available in few, if any, other editors. One that I use more and more frequently is find and replace driven by Perl regular expressions. With UltraEdit, I can do things that once required writing and running a Perl script. With UltraEdit, I do them interactively, using only the built-in feature set.
