JGsoft Newsfeed

Updated: HelpScribble 7.8.0

Thu, 2 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0700

HelpScribble 7.8.0 is now available for download.

HelpScribble's HelpContext property editor now supports Delphi XE and C++Builder XE. HelpScribble's installer will automatically install it if it detects that you have Delphi XE or C++Builder XE installed.

There are no changes to the help system in Delphi XE and C++Builder XE compared with the 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2010 versions of Delphi and C++Builder. Even the move to Unicode in Delphi 2009 has no impact. If you're migrating from older versions, follow the Delphi and C++Builder instructions on HelpScribble's web site.

The Insert Button command in the HelpTools menu now has an additional option for creating buttons that link to a target. Targets allow links (and now buttons) to point to the middle of a help topic instead of to the top of a help topic. Use the Create Target item in the HelpTools menu to create targets that links and buttons can point to.

The Renumber Topics command in the Project menu now has a checkbox that allows you to disable the gap setting. If you don't tick the Gap checkbox, then the Topic IDs of the selected range are shifted without changing the gaps in their ID numbers. If you renumber topics 10, 17, 19, and 28 with a new starting ID of 100 and without a gap, the new IDs will be 100, 107, 109, and 118. If you renumber them with a gap of 10 instead, the new IDs are 100, 110, 120, and 130.

In the Contents Editor, double-clicking an entry that points to a topic now activates that topic in HelpScribble's main window. Compiling from the command line now ignores the option to automatically save the project when compiling because the project can't have changed. This means that read-only projects can now be compiled from the command line when the option to automatically save is on.

If you have already purchased helpscribble, you can download this update for free.
Buy helpscribble now.
Complete version history.

Tips & Tricks: Type in your own replacement text in RegexMagic

Wed, 1 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0700

RegexMagic can generate a replacement text along with the regular expression, based on what you tell RegexMagic you want to do with the regex matches. You can find an example in RegexMagic's help file under RegexMagic Examples, Action, Replace Fields.

If you're already familiar, you may find it quicker to type in the replacement text yourself. If you want to include backreferences to capturing groups in the replacement text, start with adding the capturing group in the Action panel. Click the New button for each group and select which fields (as defined on the Match panel) that you want to capture.

Then, set "action to take" to "replace whole regex match" and set "how to replace" to "type in a replacement text with backreferences". Now you can type in a replacement text like you would do in a text editor such as EditPad Pro. E.g. if your regex has 3 capturing groups and you want the replacement to reverse their order and delimit them by commas, type $3,$2,$1 as the replacement text.

You can indicate the replacement text flavor you're using on the Action panel. E.g. select JGsoft flavor to use the syntax used by EditPad Pro and PowerGREP. If the flavor you set on the Action panel for specifying the replacement text is different than the flavor you set on the Regex panel for generating the final regular expression and replacement text, then RegexMagic automatically converts the replacement text you provided between the two flavors. E.g. if you select Python on the Regex panel, RegexMagic converts our sample replacement text into \3,\2,\1 because Python uses backslashes to reference capturing groups in the replacement text.

Though RegexMagic is designed to generate regular expressions and replacement texts without asking you to deal with their cryptic syntax at all, you can still provide RegexMagic with prewritten regexes and replacement text and include them as part of longer regexes and replacement text or conversion to different regex and replacement flavors.

Updated: PowerGREP 4.1.2

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0700

PowerGREP 4.1.2 is now available for download. This release brings a bunch of bug fixes and improvements.

PowerGREP is now capable of searching through Excel 2007 and 2010 files (XLSX format) in the same way as files from older Excel versions (XLS format). Both formats are now converted into a textual representation that is similar to what Excel displays. This textual conversion is what PowerGREP searches through and what it shows in the results and built-in editor. If you want to search through the raw XML inside XLSX files like previous versions of PowerGREP did, select that option in the File Formats section in the Preferences.

Windows Vista and Windows 7 use a different method for supporting high resolution displays. PowerGREP now fully supports this, making PowerGREP look good when you increase the font size by more than 125% in the display settings in Windows Vista or 7.

When you click the Abort button to abort an action, the progress bar on the Results panel now counts down 10 seconds. If the action does not abort gracefully within 10 seconds, PowerGREP will forcibly terminate it. This allows you to close PowerGREP normally or start a new search if PowerGREP got stuck on certain files for any reason.

Several features on the Action panel that did not work correctly have been fixed. Action: Filtering out files did not work in version 4.1.1, causing all files to be searched. Displaying extra context after matches did not work when using sections as context. Changing the search type between "delimited" and "list" caused an internal inconsistency in the action definition which sometimes caused errors when attempting to save or execute the action.

Importing file listings now correctly handles UNC paths with spaces in the server or share name. Turning on Search Only through Files with Results in the File Selector menu now works correctly. Making replacements using backreferences via the Search toolbar on the Editor panel now works correctly.

If you have already purchased PowerGREP 4, you can download this update for free.
Upgrade from PowerGREP 2.x or 3.x to 4.x.
Buy PowerGREP now.
Complete Version History.

Updated: DeployMaster 3.3.2

Thu, 1 Jul 2010 18:00:00 +0700

DeployMaster 3.3.2 is now available for download.

On the 3rd party tab, you can now tell DeployMaster to detect and install version 4.0 of the .NET framework. All previous versions are still supported.

Sometimes it happens that Windows does not automatically show or remove desktop shortcuts that have been installed or uninstalled. Installers created with DeployMaster 3.3.2 and their uninstallers now tell Windows to immediately refresh the desktop so installed shortcuts appear immediately and uninstalled shortcuts disappear immediately.

If your users user don't want your installer to put anything on the desktop, they can now pass the /nodesktop parameter on the command line when starting your installer. This parameter is intended for use with the /silent parameter which runs your installer without showing anything on the screen. Though /nodesktop works without /silent too, it is better to put your desktop icons in a separate component on the Files tab in DeployMaster. That way the component can be easily deselected via the Advanced Options Installation if users don't want any desktop icons.

One bug was fixed. DeployMaster 3.3.0 and 3.3.1 failed to close if they could not save the .language files in %APPDATA%\JGsoft\DeployMaster.

If you have already purchased DeployMaster, you can download this free update for free.
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Complete Version History.

Tips & Tricks: Rename Files Based on Their Contents

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0700

PowerGREP 4, released in February, is a major upgrade from previous versions with many new capabilities. That includes several new action types, such as "rename files", and new features on the Action panel such as "filter files". This example demonstrates how you can use those two features to rename files based on their contents.

The "rename files" action type enables you to rename files by searching and replacing through their file names or paths. With the "filter files" feature you can first run a search through the contents of each file and then use (part of) the search match in the search-and-replace through the file's name. This way you can extract text from the file's contents and insert it into the file's name.

As an example, we'll rename a bunch of HTML files. The new name of each file will be whatever is specified in the <TITLE> tag inside the file. If a file does not have a <TITLE> tag, we use the contents of the <H1> tag instead. If a file has neither tag, it is not renamed.

Select the HTML files you want to rename in the File Selector.
Start with a fresh action.
Set the action type to "rename files".
Leave "what to rename" set to "file name only". Our search-and-replace should only change the file's name.
Set "filter files" to "require all search terms to match". Leave the search type as "regular expression".
Enter the regular expression <(TITLE|H1)[^<>]*>(?'title'[^<>]+)</\1> in the Search box in the "filter files" part of the action. This regex matches the opening and closing <TITLE> or <H1> tags (whichever pair comes first) and any text between them. The text between them is captured into the named capturing group "title".
Enter the regular expression ^.*\. in the Search box in the main part of the action. This regex matches everything up to and including the last dot in the file's name.
Enter the replacement text ${title}. to replace the file's name with the contents of the tag matched by the "filter files" regex. The replacement also puts back the dot that delimits the file's extension. The extension is not matched by the regex and thus remains unchanged.
Tick the extra processing checkbox. An additional set of controls for entering search terms appears.
Use [\\/:*?"<>|] as the regular expression for extra processing. This regex matches any character that is not allowed in file names by the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Leave the extra processing replacement blank so invalid characters are deleted.
Set the backup file options as you like them.
Click the Preview button to run a test.
If all looks well, click the Rename button to actually rename the files.

Should a file not have a <TITLE> or <H1> tag, then it is filtered out and not renamed. If a file has both a <TITLE> and <H1> tag, or multiple occurrences of the same tag, then only the first tag is used. Once all the regular expressions in "filter files" have found a match, PowerGREP considers the file to meet the filtering requirement. It won't look for any further matches for the filtering regex.

This action is available in the PowerGREP.pgl library as "Rename files based on HTML title tags".

Updated: EditPad Lite and Pro 6.6.4

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0700

EditPad Lite and Pro version 6.6.4 are now available for download. This version brings a few minor fixes and improvements.

EditPad now retries opening the clipboard several times instead of immediately showing a "cannot open clipboard" error if another application such as a clipboard monitor is interfering with EditPad's ability to access the clipboard. This error was a likely occurrence when you repeat a macro that copies and paste things thousands of times. Though such a macro will now copy and paste everything correctly, the macro will run slowly if a clipboard monitor tries to capture everything EditPad copies to the clipboard. The clipboard sidebar in Word 2007 is an example of a clipboard monitor that tries to grab everything. AceText 2.2.0 and prior also had this problem. The latest version of AceText no longer interferes with EditPad (or any other application that copies and pastes in an automated fashion).

In Options, Configure File Types, Syntax & Navigation, you can now select a new PHP file navigation scheme that makes all braces foldable. The previous PHP file navigation scheme that makes only classes and functions foldable is still available and is still the default.

Synchronizing the spell checker's user word list is now done only as needed rather than each time when activating/deactivating EditPad Pro. This avoids needless delays in switching between EditPad and other applications when your user word list is extensive. EditPad now cleans up obsolete history item registry keys or ini sections when saving its state.

In the Favorites menu, paths that are too long were trimmed at the right instead of the left, chopping off the file name in EditPad 6.6.x. Pressing Ctrl+Del (to delete a line break and whitespace at the start of the next line) with the cursor placed beyond the end of the line did not insert spaces to extend the line like pressing Del (to delete just the line break) does. This caused the first word on the next line to be positioned to the left of the cursor instead of at the cursor.

When searching for a regular expression in hexadecimal mode the regular expression now has syntax coloring applied. If a file other than the active file needed to be reloaded from disk while searching through all files, an access violation occurred if the file is larger than 64K and is edited in text mode. Double-clicking URLs such as file://\\server\share\file.txt now opens the file instead of doing nothing.

If you already purchased EditPad Pro 6.x.x, you can download this minor upgrade for free.
If you have EditPad Pro 4 or 5, you can upgrade to version 6 at a special price.
Buy EditPad Pro now.
Download EditPad Lite.
Complete version history.

Updated: AceText 2.2.1

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0700

AceText 2.2.1 is now available for download. This version brings a few minor fixes and improvements.

AceText now waits for all modifier keys to be released before sending keystrokes to another application. This avoids problems like Ctrl+Enter being pressed to paste a clip and Ctrl being released while AceText is sending the Ctrl+V key to the target application, resulting in a V typed in the target application rather than a paste command being executed.

Some applications rapidly and repeatedly copy and paste text. E.g. you may be running a macro in a text editor that copies and pastes thousands of times. AceText no longer attempts to capture rapidly copied text into ClipHistory. Because the Windows clipboard does not allow two applications to access it at the same time, the other application's copy/paste actions may fail if AceText attempts to access the clipboard during its copy/paste sequence. Most applications do not attempt to reopen the clipboard when opening the clipboard fails, and simply fail to copy or paste, with or without showing an error message.

Some applications open and close the clipboard multiple types for a single copy operation. This is contrary to Microsoft's rules for the Windows clipboard, which require an application to open and close the clipboard only once. Applications that misbehave this way include Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft's own Excel. When these applications copy something to the clipboard, a clipboard monitor such as AceText receives multiple copy events, making it look like you copied the same text several times. AceText already handled this correctly, capturing the text only once in the ClipHistory, except when Auto Append was turned on. Now, AceText will append the text only once when using Auto Append.

If AceText remembered that a collection tab was previously active and the AceText Tower was not visible, then the collection would appear with a blank clip tree until you switched to another tab in AceText. This bug only occurred in version 2.2.0. Older versions did not remember the active tab.

If you have already purchased AceText, you can download this free update for free.
Buy AceText now.
Complete Version History.

Updated: RegexMagic 1.0.6

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:00:00 +0700

RegexMagic is a brand new product from Just Great Software. Its purpose is to make it easier to create regular expressions. While it serves the same purpose as RegexBuddy, its approach is totally different. As such, RegexMagic will certainly not replace RegexBuddy. Rather, it aims to serve the need of a different group of people. Some will wish to use both RegexBuddy and RegexMagic at the same time.

RegexMagic 1.0.6 is now available for download. This release fixes a few minor issues.

Marking two or more samples for the same field sometimes caused RegexMagic to lock up if it detected a date and time pattern with two or more different date and time formats. Detection of date and time formats is now improved, eliminating the lockup while also producing smarter results.

The PowerGREP button on the GREP tab in RegexMagic now launches PowerGREP 4 if it is installed. RegexMagic is now also capable of detecting portable installations of PowerGREP if RegexMagic is installed onto the same device.

Updated: RegexBuddy 3.4.2

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0700

RegexBuddy 3.4.2 is now available for download. This release brings a bunch of minor fixes and improvements.

Handling of literal line breaks (inserted by pressing Enter) in regular expressions was improved. The Create tab now indicates line breaks separately rather than grouping them with other printable characters. On the Test tab, a literal line break now matches a line break in any style: Windows CRLF, UNIX LF, or classic Mac CR. Previously only Windows-style line breaks were matched. This avoids confusion when testing regular expressions on sample files that don't use Windows-style line breaks. This does assume that in your actual application, the literal line breaks in your regular expression use the same style as the line breaks in the data you're using the regular expression on. When this assumption does not hold true, your regular expression will fail in your actual application, unless that application is the latest version of EditPad Pro (6.6.2) or PowerGREP (3.5.7 or 4.0.5). Except for the latest version of the JGsoft flavor no other regex flavor automatically adapts literal line breaks to different line break styles. To match specific line breaks, use \r\n for Windows, \n for UNIX, and \r for classic Mac. The behavior of these regex tokens has not changed.

When copying Delphi strings and when generating Delphi source code snippets, RegexBuddy now splits Delphi strings into pieces of at most 255 elements. The Delphi compiler does not support string literals with more than 255 elements. Longer strings need to be specified as a concatenation of multiple literal strings. The PHP preg source code snippet "search and replace through a string" now correctly passes the name of the callback function as a string. The PowerShell source code template now includes functions using Select-String to grep.

When generating source code snippets on the Use tab, RegexBuddy converts your regular expression to the regex flavor used by the selected programming language. Two fixes were made to this conversion. The shorthand \w is now correctly converted into [[:alnum:]_] when used outside a character class and the target flavor supports POSIX but not shorthand character classes. Numbered backreferences to named capturing groups are now adjusted correctly.

On the Library panel, double-clicking an item in the list now loads the regular expression as if you'd clicked the Use button. The test data associated with the regular expression is not loaded when double-clicking. Loading a regular expression from the library no longer changes the flavor selection when the flavor selection is locked by the application that invoked RegexBuddy. The regular expression is converted to the locked flavor instead.

The PowerGREP button on the GREP panel now launches PowerGREP 4 if it is installed. If not, it launches PowerGREP 3 as before. The PowerGREP button can now detect portable installs of PowerGREP if RegexBuddy and PowerGREP are installed on the same device in their default folders.

If you have already purchased or upgraded to RegexBuddy 3, you can download this free update for free.
If you own RegexBuddy 2, you can upgrade to version 3 at a special price.
Buy RegexBuddy now.
Complete version history.

Updated: PowerGREP 3.5.8

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 17:00:00 +0700

PowerGREP 3.5.8 is now available for download. This is a free minor update for PowerGREP 3 users who haven't upgraded to PowerGREP 4 yet. PowerGREP 4 users can also download PowerGREP 3.5.8 if they need to run PowerGREP on Windows NT4, 98, or ME which PowerGREP 4 no longer supports.

Since version 3.3.0 PowerGREP has been capable of searching through .zip files that are stored inside other .zip files. What PowerGREP did not handle correctly until now is .zip files stored inside a folder inside another .zip file. Those were completely ignored unless you manually expanded the .zip inside the folder inside the other .zip in the File Selector.