Why would someone use UltraEdit with SAS?

[Residentx10]

I had a conversation with a clinical company yesterday and they mentioned they were using UltraEdit with SAS.

https://www.ultraedit.com/wiki/Main_Page 

Why would a company need to use this software? They are using SAS 9.4 on Unix not SAS Viya yet.

But the files were .prg. Can the new SAS Studio be a replacement for this?

[Kurt_Bremser]

UltraEdit is a very powerful editor that is used by many people for code, and some prefer it over the SAS Enhanced Editor for editing SAS code.

And I guess that anybody unhappy with the Enhanced Editor of SAS for Windows or Enterprise Guide will also be unhappy with the editor built into SAS Studio.

Me, I have never found a need for an external editor. Studio, Enhanced Editor and the editors in Display Manager (UNIX and z/OS) were fine for me.

SAS program files should always be saved with a .sas extension, but that is just common practice among all the people I know to work with SAS.

[Peter_L]

I tried UltraEdit but found I preferred jEdit. It has more intelligent highlighting, particularly for HTML with embedded CSS or javascript. It works well for SAS. If you embed other languages in SAS, you can use its delegation mechanism to highlight them correctly.

The main reason I use a separate editor is to search and replace in multiple files. The SAS editor deals with only one file at a time. jEdit also has an excellent side-by-side file difference plugin.

[AhmedAl_Attar · Accepted solution]

Hi @Residentx10 

I personally love the ability to

• View and Edit Remote Linux files  -- Substitute to WinSCP/Other FTP programs
• Compare Remote Linux files -- Substitute to Linux diff command
• Use the Terminal window feature to issue Linux Commands and check the status of SAS processes  -- Substitute to Putty/other ssh terminal programs 

From my Windows UltraEdit program. UltraEdit makes the process of reviewing SAS log/xml/program files much easier and more interactive/intuitive

[Residentx10]

@AhmedAl_Attar Thanks for your comments.

[AllanBowe]

Our (strong) recommendation, for professional SAS developers, is - VS Code

Using plugins such as SASjs and tools such as the SASjs CLI you have (almost) everything you need in an IDE:

* Terminal access

* Ability to compile / build / deploy SAS code to all server types (Foundation SAS, SAS 9 EBI, SAS Viya)

* Ability to run tests and query the test results

* Ability to generate HTML documentation for SAS code

* Ability to execute Jobs and Flows

* Folder management

* SAS linting

* Scaffolding for 'quick start' of SAS projects

* Local web server for debugging frontends

* Syntax highlighting

* Vast array of useful marketplace extensions such as git lens

I could go on and on!  VS Code is great!  Thanks to cloud providers like gitpod, you can open ANY github repository in a cloud instance of VS Code by simply adding "gitpod.io/#" at the beginning of the url.  Check this out:  https://gitpod.io/#github.com/sasjs/template_jobs

[Residentx10]

@AllanBowe VS Code sounds irresistible but it's Microsoft. They are doing almost everything they can to "Gate" SAS. I will read SAS Studio technical documentation before I go down this route. Don't get me wrong, Microsoft makes great products but I'm here to learn SAS not Microsoft
"

[AllanBowe]

@Residentx10 - I'm with you.  Did you know that Microsoft have started 'switching off' windows laptops in Belarus and Russia?  Users are literally being logged out due to "expired licences".

I'm totally against the war but having a machine shut itself down on the basis of a registration address just goes to show that individuals and companies may be better off with operating systems / server environments that are truly within their control. 

On that note, we also support SASjs on VS Codium, which is essentially VS Code but without the microsoft (telemetry).  See:  https://open-vsx.org/extension/sasjs/sasjs-for-vscode

[ballardw]

Editor choices (and abilities vs limitations) is a very old programmer topic.

There are things some editors do that some programmers consider "essential", whether it be code formatting or regular expression search and replace or something else that others don't. So choice of an editor is one way that users can implement such.

Once upon a time my SAS environment was hosted on an OS/2 operating system. I discovered the programming editor EPM and quite often used that as one of the features of that editor was to submit the file to different programs. Since I was working in SAS and FORTRAN having a single editor that let me choose which system to submit the code files to was helpful. There were also some useful features such as customizable syntax highlighting that were not in the SAS 6 version of the editor.

So why? Because they want to. Do they "need" to? Depends on how essential the features the user wants that are not in the SAS supplied editor.

FWIW, once upon a time I was in a programming class that used Pascal as the language. I would write and debug programs on Turbo Pascal before transferring the code files to the school system because I loathed the VI editor that was the only one available at school.

[Residentx10]

@ballardw OS/2...

Did SAS really run in OS/2? That's amazing!! That's how I got my start in technology. I was working at UPS throwing boxes and they needed someone that knew OS/2. I bought a copy of OS/2 from local reseller who had a discounted copy ($80.xx) and learned REXX and DB2 and talked my way out of box sorting, lol.

[ballardw]

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@Residentx10 wrote:

@ballardw OS/2...

Did SAS really run in OS/2? That's amazing!! That's how I got my start in technology. I was working at UPS throwing boxes and they needed someone that knew OS/2. I bought a copy of OS/2 from local reseller who had a discounted copy ($80.xx) and learned REXX and DB2 and talked my way out of box sorting, lol.

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Definitely ran SAS 6, a couple of versions, under OS/2. I actually had a partition on that machine with Windows and SAS for that as well. Which failed because the Windows  memory management would go belly up frequently. Even ran the SAS for DOS under OS/2 for a while, which Windows would not do.

[Residentx10]

@ballardw This is an old topic but I'm new to SAS and I need to ask questions. SAS Viya seems so capable as a product. The editor question was really about understanding if a vendor had created something so unique that I couldn't ignore.

[FreelanceReinh]

Hello @Residentx10,

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@Residentx10 wrote:

I had a conversation with a clinical company yesterday and they mentioned they were using UltraEdit with SAS.

(...)

Why would a company need to use this software? They are using SAS 9.4 on Unix not SAS Viya yet.

---

I think the important keyword here is "Unix" and I assume that you are familiar with the SAS Enhanced Editor or any other common text editor under Windows, e.g., Notepad. Then, if you switch to the SAS Program Editor in a Unix environment, you will know almost immediately why that clinical company resorted to an alternative text editor such as UltraEdit.

Unless they have improved it recently, you would have to learn commands (!) with a certain syntax (or remember them from SAS 6) to perform even the most basic text editing. For example, there is the I command, which "inserts one or more blank lines," or the TS command, which "splits the line of text at the cursor, and moves the remaining text to a new line," -- and you'd really need those because simply pressing the Return key wouldn't work (if I remember correctly). When I had that experience for the first time (2006, after nine years with Windows SAS versions 6.12, 8.x and 9) I could not believe it and felt like being thrown back into the computing world of the 1980s. Seeing those ancient line commands in a SAS 9.4 (rather than SAS 5.xx) documentation makes me shudder.

[ballardw]

If you type PROGRAM into the command box for SAS 9.4 you can open an editor window that is the old text editor more or less unchanged from SAS 6.06(I think).

The joys of Line vs Block commands, setting Bounds and the various Justify commands. Who can forget JJC to center each line of a block of text in the editor. (Actually never found a use for that one). But the Block copy and Shift (not indent) commands. Though R(n), RR(n) to make a designated number of lines or blocks does have a certain appeal when doing some similar parallel coding when you know that you want N versions.

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@FreelanceReinh wrote:

Hello @Residentx10,

---

@Residentx10 wrote:

I had a conversation with a clinical company yesterday and they mentioned they were using UltraEdit with SAS.

(...)

Why would a company need to use this software? They are using SAS 9.4 on Unix not SAS Viya yet.

---

I think the important keyword here is "Unix" and I assume that you are familiar with the SAS Enhanced Editor or any other common text editor under Windows, e.g., Notepad. Then, if you switch to the SAS Program Editor in a Unix environment, you will know almost immediately why that clinical company resorted to an alternative text editor such as UltraEdit.

Unless they have improved it recently, you would have to learn commands (!) with a certain syntax (or remember them from SAS 6) to perform even the most basic text editing. For example, there is the I command, which "inserts one or more blank lines," or the TS command, which "splits the line of text at the cursor, and moves the remaining text to a new line," -- and you'd really need those because simply pressing the Return key wouldn't work (if I remember correctly). When I had that experience for the first time (2006, after nine years with Windows SAS versions 6.12, 8.x and 9) I could not believe it and felt like being thrown back into the computing world of the 1980s. Seeing those ancient line commands in a SAS 9.4 (rather than SAS 5.xx) documentation makes me shudder.

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[FreelanceReinh]

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@ballardw wrote:

If you type PROGRAM into the command box for SAS 9.4 you can open an editor window that is the old text editor more or less unchanged from SAS 6.06(I think).

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I know that the "Program Editor" (with its line command "feature") still exists and that even some of the most esteemed SAS experts prefer it to the Enhanced Editor, but I think the version under Windows (incl. the SAS 6.12 version) is different from that in Unix: You may use the arcane line commands, but the Windows-standard behavior of the keyboard (such as pressing the Return key for a line break) works as well. My painful experience under Unix was that the routine use of the keyboard failed.