I'm also not hot on buying a program like that. Is it basically as simple as Word/Notepad? I use those programs because they don't mess with anything.

Right. Neither does UltraEdit unless you want it to.

UltraEdit is like Notepad on steroids.

It doesn't write code for you, but if you open a code file (such as HTML), it will syntax-highlight it for you.

It doesn't have the 32k file size limitation of Notepad. You can open files of any size, including many gigabytes if you wanted.

It has a binary editor mode which many people consider indespensible.

If you've been doing all your web editing in Notepad, using UltraEdit is like taking off the boxing gloves.

It can directly edit the files on the file server (no more "download, save, upload").

I never use Notepad any more, everything gets opened in UltraEdit.