Is it possible to setup a tool item within UltraEdit to call an external program with two parameters being the most recent and second most recent windows selected? Just like how the compare tool built into UE does.

The reason I ask is I have Beyond Compare as my external diff program and I don't want to upgrade to UltraCompare.

Thanks for your help.

-Flynn

Hi Flynn

I found this in the help file:

UE help wrote:How can I use a different compare application?

By default selecting the Compare Files command in the File menu invokes UltraEdit's own compare utility. If you prefer to use a different compare application you may do this by adding the following setting to the uedit32.ini file under the [Settings] section:

Compare EXE="fully qualified path of EXE"

This setting allows the user to specify a different File Compare program to be used in place of the standard utility provided with UltraEdit. If this is set, UltraEdit will use this EXE in place of its own utility. The only command line parameters passed to the utility will be the file names (with paths) of the files to be compared.

So I'm guessing! By adding

[Settings]
Compare EXE=full name of the compare EXE

you can get what you want. Please note that the full name of the compare EXE must be specified without double quotes even when the path contains 1 or more spaces.

You might want to make a backup of your ini file before making changes.
Cheap insurance and it beats that awful feeling I wish I would of done ...

Good Luck

That worked. Thanks for the help.

Guess I should RTFM next time.

I'm specifying a custom compare tool in the configuration file. When I click on the Compare Files button, a dialog window opens. Can I bypass this window and go straight to the comparison application?

That is not possible with this method. UltraEdit need to know which files should be compared on running a compare of two text files. So UE always opens the standard dialog normally used for UC Professional or UC Lite even when using a different comparison tool because in this dialog the user can specify which files should be compared. Preset are always by UltraEdit the currently active file as first file and the previously active file as second file.

If you want to run your compare tool with the current active file and select the second file later directly in the comparison tool you should configure a user tool - see the power tip Creating user and project tools.

Be careful to configure the correct options for your comparison tool. I guess, it is a Windows program and not a DOS or 32-bit console application. The active file can be specified on the command line with "%f" - press button Help in the user tool configuration dialog to get more help about the options. A good idea would be to extract the first icon from your comparison tool (with the dimensions used in UltraEdit) for example with IrfanView and save it as BMP or ICO file and specify this file in the tool configuration dialog for your comparison tool. That would make it easier to identify your comparison tool in UE menu/toolbar.

It appears that the way UltraEdit passes the file arguments to the external diff program in version 16.00 has changed, so that now, the external diff tool chokes on file paths with spaces. Anyone know of a workaround?

Interesting. I wonder if this is related to a bug in UltraCompare where a command line invocation of uc.com garbles the commands passed to uc.exe if the file paths contain spaces. IDM have already acknowledged this; it's currently still there in UC 7.10.0.1010, but you can expect it to be fixed shortly.

I contacted IDM support about bad file arguments being passed to the external diff program and they said:

IDM wrote:Thanks for your message. We recently received another report of this and confirmed that this is an issue and actually has been since v15.20. This will be corrected in a future update, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

I tested that now also with UE v16.10.0.1036 by making UC Prof. not visible for UE and adding manually to uedit32.ini under section [Settings] the line

Compare EXE=C:\Temp\Compare Test.bat

The batch file with the space character in the name contained following lines:
As I executed the compare files command, the batch file echoed:

"C:\Temp\Compare Test.bat" C:\Temp\File1.txt C:\Temp\File2.txt

Unfortunately the issue with file names containing a space character is still not fixed and therefore calling the "batch compare tool" with the text files renamed to include a space character results in

"C:\Temp\Compare Test.bat" C:\Temp\File 1.txt

instead of

"C:\Temp\Compare Test.bat" "C:\Temp\File 1.txt" "C:\Temp\File 2.txt"

Returning after a five year hiatus in project management back to programing. In an earlier version (UEStudio v13) you could swap out UltraCompare by adding
to the uestudio.ini file.  This no longer seems to work in the currently latest UEStudio version 20.10. Am I correct in assuming that this feature has been removed?

Thanks very much. That was it, I had spaces around the '='.