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Latest Issue of the
Just Great Software Newsletter

February 2010

Contents

1. Major Upgrade: PowerGREP 4

2. Updated: PowerGREP 3.5.6

3. What's New in PowerGREP 4

Major Upgrade: PowerGREP 4

PowerGREP 4.0.0 was released earlier this month. This is a major upgrade from previous releases 3.x.x with a long list of new features and improvements. The third item in this newsletter describes those new features in detail.

If you purchased PowerGREP on or after 9 February 2009, go to http://www.powergrep.com/download.html to download PowerGREP 4.0.3. This date takes our policy of one year of free major upgrades into account. If you're already using PowerGREP 4.0.0, 4.0.1, or 4.0.2, please download and install version 4.0.3 immediately. Though versions 4.0.x only fix a handful of bugs, some of those can cause PowerGREP to crash.

If you purchased PowerGREP before 9 February 2009, go to http://www.powergrep.com/upgradenow.html to upgrade to PowerGREP 4 at a significant discount. Upgrade purchases are also covered by our 3-month money-back guarantee. If you'd like to try version 4 first, you can download the free trial version of PowerGREP 4 at http://www.powergrep.com/download.html and install it next to your licensed version of PowerGREP 3. PowerGREP 3 and 4 can be installed and uninstalled separately.

If you did not purchase PowerGREP yet, go to http://www.powergrep.com/buynow.html to buy PowerGREP or go to http://www.powergrep.com/download.html to download the free trial version. New licenses are valid for all PowerGREP 4.x.x releases. You can also download PowerGREP 3.5.6 and even 2.3.3 if you want to use PowerGREP on Windows 95, 95, ME, or NT4. PowerGREP 4 requires Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7.

Updated: PowerGREP 3.5.6

PowerGREP 3.5.6 is now available for download. This is a free minor update for PowerGREP 3.x.x users.

The Buy Now item in the Help menu has been replaced with an Upgrade Now item. This item allows you to purchase the upgrade to PowerGREP 4 without having to look up your PowerGREP user ID.

Updating the list of included/excluded files when typing into the File Selector panel is no longer slowed down by folders containing lots of files, if those folders are collapsed. Turning off "same masks for all folders" now correctly disables the file mask controls when a folder that is not marked to be included in the search is selected. This avoids errors when changing file mask settings for such a folder.

Using placeholders mixed with literal text with the search type set to literal text no longer causes PowerGREP to mangle the literal text. %MATCH%, %GROUP1%, etc. are now correctly replaced with the matched text when using file sectioning. The default backup type set in the preferences is now used correctly when starting PowerGREP when the option to remember the last used action is turned off.

PowerGREP again saves that state of its toolbars and panels on Windows 98 and ME.

What's New in PowerGREP 4

PowerGREP 4 is a major upgrade with a long list of new features and improvements. These are some of the more important new features.

PowerGREP 4 is a full Unicode application. While PowerGREP 3 fully supported Unicode in the contents of the files it searched through, PowerGREP 4 supports Unicode everywhere. The main benefit is that it can read files with characters that are not supported by your computer's default code page. This does mean that PowerGREP 4 only runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. Windows 98, ME, and NT4 are no longer supported. PowerGREP will refuse to run at all on anything older than Windows 2000. If you're using Windows 2000 you should have Service Pack 4 installed.

PowerGREP's edit controls now support bidirectional text editing. This means you can properly work with text in right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, and languages written with complex scripts such as the Indic scripts. To make it easy to switch between the editing modes that you prefer for various writing systems, all editing settings are now grouped into what PowerGREP 4 calls a "text layout". You can configure separate text layouts in the Action, Results, and Editor sections of the Preferences screen. These settings include font, text direction, cursor movement, word selection, line and character spacing, etc.

PowerGREP can now search multiple files simultaneously. This speeds up searching for complex regular expressions (i.e. CPU-intensive searches) by using more than one CPU core. It also speeds up searches across multiple disks or servers by searching files on different disks or servers at the same time. In the Action section of the Preferences you can configure just how much of your PC's processing power you want PowerGREP to use.

The Action panel has lots of new options that give PowerGREP new capabilities. Some of the features that were already in PowerGREP 3 have been rearranged a bit to make room for the new features. E.g. the file sectioning is now positioned before the main part of the action to better indicate the order in which your regular expressions are applied.

The "action type" drop down list provides 5 new choices: Simple search, rename files, delete search matches, merge files, and split files. The "simple search" action type runs a search just like "display search matches" used to do, except that it provides fewer options. This provides a less busy interface when you don't need all of PowerGREP's power. The "display search matches" action type was renamed to "search" and shows all the options. The "rename files" action type allows you to rename, move, or copy files by running a search-and-replace through their file names. The "delete search matches" action type is identical to the "search-and-replace" action type, except that it doesn't ask for a replacement text. It replaces all matches with nothing, thus deleting them. There's also an option to delete only duplicate matches. The "merge files" action type is similar to the "collect data" action type, except that it collects the entire file if a search match is found in a file. The "split files" action type is also similar to "collect data". It collects individual matches like "collect data" does, but instead of using the replacement text as the text to be collected, it expects the replacement text to specify a path to a file to save the match in. The "collect data", "merge files", and "split files" action types now all have the ability to save matches from multiple source files into a single target file without requiring the matches from all source files to be saved into the same target file.

PowerGREP 3 introduced the concept of "file sectioning" which it used both to restrict the search to different parts of the file as well as to display context on the Results panel. In PowerGREP 4, the same file sectioning options are available, but they're only used to restrict the search to different parts of the file. The Action panel now provides a totally separate set of options to collect context. So you can have line-based context even if you're not using line-by-line file sectioning. You can also collect additional blocks or lines of context before and/or after each match. Using sections as context is still available as an option.

Right-clicking on a Search box on the Action panel shows a new Match Placeholders item. This item allows you to insert any of the match placeholders supported by PowerGREP. PowerGREP 4 supports a whole bunch of new placeholders for match counts, dates, and file sizes. You can also do basic arithmetic on numeric placeholders, including on search matches that happen to be numbers. This makes it easy to create and edit various numbered lists.

While PowerGREP 3 could transparently read and write zip archives, PowerGREP 4 can do the same with zip, 64-bit zip, 7-zip and tar archives. It can also compress an decompress individual files using gzip and bzip2. Archives using the ARJ, CAB, ISO, UDF, DEB, LHA, LHZ, RAR, RMP, and WIM formats can be searched through but not modified.

IFilter support enables PowerGREP 4 to search through any file format for which you have an IFilter installed. IFilter is the system used by Windows Search to search through files in proprietary formats. By default PowerGREP uses IFilter to search DOC and DOCX files. Compared with PowerGREP's built-in decoders, this adds Unicode support for DOC, and allows DOCX files to be searched without XML codes.

PowerGREP 3 allowed you to make and revert individual replacements on the Editor panel after previewing or executing a search-and-replace. PowerGREP 4 takes this functionality to a whole new level. You can now make and revert replacements on both the Results and Editor panels. Changes made on one panel are automatically reflected in the other. In addition to making or reverting individual replacements, the Editor panel can now make and revert all replacements in the selected text, and all matches in the file you have opened. The Results panel can do all that and also make or revert all replacements in all selected files or in all files listed in the results. This means that if you preview an action and then want to execute it for real, you can simply tell the Results panel to make all the replacements instead of executing the action again.

To assist with editing your files after previewing or executing an action, the Results and Editor panel now have their own search toolbars. They're docked at the bottom by default but you can drag them elsewhere like any other toolbar. These search bars allow you to quickly search through the results as displayed on the Results panel or through the file you have opened in the editor.

PowerGREP 3 could copy, move, and delete files while executing a "find files" action. PowerGREP 4 can still do this even though the action type was renamed to "list files". What's new in PowerGREP 4 is that the Results menu has items to copy, move, and delete files after executing any kind of action. It can do this with the files that were searched through, the files in which matches were found, the files in which no matches were found, or the target files that were created. The File Selector menu can also copy, move, and delete the files or folders that you have selected in the File Selector, whether an action was executed or not.

If you previously used batch files to execute multiple PowerGREP actions, you can now combine all those actions into a single PowerGREP Sequence and invoke PowerGREP just once to execute all actions in the sequence. Actions in a sequence can be made to operate on the files in which matches were found by a previous action in the sequence, or the files in which no matches were found by a previous action, or the target files that were created by a previous action.

The Library panel may seem unchanged. But PowerGREP libraries can now store file selections, search terms, and sequences in addition to actions. You'll find new Add to Library items in the File Selector and Sequence menus. There's also an Add to Library item in the menu that appears when you click one of the black downward pointing triangles above a Search box on the Action panel. This menu also has copy and paste items to copy whole lists of search terms.

The fixed display limit of 100,000 characters is now a dynamic limit based on actual memory usage with an upper limit that can be set in the Preferences. Problems with individual files no longer cause PowerGREP to lock up, regardless of whether the problem is the file or a bug in PowerGREP. The thread handling the file is aborted, an error is added to the results, and a new thread proceeds with the next file.

Actions can now be paused and resumed. This can be useful if PowerGREP is executing a big job and you want it to wait while you use your computer for another task. When running PowerGREP unattended, you can use the /silent command line parameter to stop PowerGREP from displaying anything on the screen.

You can talk about all this and everything else related to PowerGREP and regular expressions on the new built-in discussion forum. If you have purchased PowerGREP 4, you can access it via the Forum tab right in the PowerGREP 4 software itself.

That's it for this month. Thank you for using our software, and see you next month!

Kind regards,

Jan Goyvaerts

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