Adding a Wordfile for ultraedit

UltraEdit supports 13 commonly-used languages out of the box; however, as of UltraEdit v15.00, UltraEdit isn't limited in the amount of languages it supports. You can add support for many more languages than the default languages supported.

Adding and removing languages is now easier than ever before. You can add or remove languages simply by adding/deleting the language files to/from the wordfile directory. The following steps will guide you through adding support for other languages.

Note: There are hundreds of user-submitted wordfiles available for download here.

Important Note: This power tip is for users running UltraEdit v15.00 or UEStudio v09.10 and later. If you are running v14.20 or previous go to our pre-v15 power tip on syntax highlighting.

Adding a Wordfile

As of UltraEdit v15.00, UltraEdit will read all the files in the wordfile directory - allowing UE to support highlighting for all languages which have a wordfile defined in the wordfile directory.

Adding support for a new language is as easy as copying a file into a directory. First, get the text of the wordfile (either by writing your own or by downloading a user-submitted wordfile from our site).

For our example, we will use a user-submitted wordfile from our site. Simply "Select All" and then "Copy" the contents of the wordfile in your browser.

Now open a new file in UltraEdit (CTRL+N), and paste the contents of the file, then save the file (CTRL+S) with a .uew extension.

For example, if your wordfile name was "csharp", you would name the file "csharp.uew".

Note: The default wordfile directory is "%appdata%\IDMComp\UltraEdit\Wordfiles\". You can find the directory by typing %appdata%\IDMComp\UltraEdit\Wordfiles\ directly into the File Name field in the "Save" dialog.

After you've saved the file into your "wordfiles" directory, restart UltraEdit/UEStudio. The new highlighting language will not be available until you have restarted the application.

Once you have restarted, you should then see that the new highlighting language is available in the View -> View As submenu.

Note: You can also change the wordfile directory in UltraEdit in Advanced -> Configuration -> Editor Display -> Syntax Highlighting.

Having problems with adding a new wordfile?

Have you followed all of the steps above, only to see that your wordfile is still not showing up properly? There are a couple of items to check:

1. The most common issue in regards to adding a wordfile is that the user is saving the wordfile into the wrong directory. There should be two "wordfiles" directories on your system:

     1 - The UltraEdit installation directory (C:\Program Files\IDM Computer Solutions\UltraEdit\wordfiles) - Incorrect
     2 - The UltraEdit configuration directory (%appdata%\IDMComp\UltraEdit\wordfiles) - Correct

Unless you have specified otherwise, the config directory is used for your working copy of the wordfiles, therefore your new wordfile must be saved in this directory, and not in the Program Files directory. (You can access your %appdata% directory by pressing Windows Key + R, typing %appdata% and pressing Enter.)

2. Another issue that may occur when adding a wordfile is that it contains Unix line terminators, which are not valid for wordfiles. To check this, open the wordfile you have added in UltraEdit/UEStudio and look in the status bar. Do you see "DOS" or "UNIX"? If you see "UNIX", the file's line terminators are incorrect. To fix this, press F12 and change the "Line Terminator" dropdown to "DOS Terminators - CR/LF", then save the file. Restart the editor to initialize the converted wordfile.