I’m a Mac user, but for my job I have a company Windows laptop. It used to come with UE and I absolutely loved it. I work with large XML files (think 500 MB) a lot and UE would open/format/xpath/regex/etc. them with 0 issue.
Then upper management forgot they employed engineers and did not renew the license.
Now I’m stuck with VS Code which chokes when I open a 20 MB file.
On the Windows side there were a bunch of editors that had similar features or had already solved the issues BBEdit solved for Mac users. It was popular, but not ubiquitous the way BBEdit was.
I haven’t kept up with it but UE is still the most functional editor I’ve used. I’ve dabbled in Sublime, BBEdit, VIM and others but UE had some tricks none other have matched.
I never understood why there was so much love for BBEdit on Mac and so little love for UltraEdit on Windows.
They were both released around the same time, selling to the same audience just on different platforms.
This was also during a time where there was many options.