Free, open-source alternatives to UltraEdit

UltraEdit is a commercial text and code editor for Windows, macOS and Linux. It is known for opening very large files, column and multi-caret editing, regular-expression search across files, and a hex mode for binary data.

The open-source editors below cover the same everyday job of editing code and plain text in many languages. VSCodium and Zed bring language server support and project-wide search, Pulsar continues the extensible Atom editor, and Geany is a compact editor with syntax highlighting, symbol lists and build commands. None of them is built around huge files or hex editing the way UltraEdit is, so those workloads may need a dedicated tool.