PowerGREP 5.3.2 is now available for download.
Some files such as the DOCX and XLSX files saved by Microsoft Office are technically ZIP archives that contain XML and other files. PowerGREP can treat such files as compound documents if you select such a configuration for “file formats to convert to plain text” on the File Selector panel. This lets you search through the XML files inside the document, while still treating the DOCX or XLSX file as a single document file that should be moved or copied as a whole when you tell PowerGREP to copy or move matching files. In previous versions this did not work correctly if you had a search-and-replace action make its replacements in copies of the files. The target file would be missing any internal files in which PowerGREP did not have to make replacements. Now PowerGREP ensures the entire compound document is copied before making replacements.
PowerGREP has supported file paths longer than 260 characters since version 5.0.0. It does this by adding the \\?\ prefix before passing long paths to the Windows API. This release fixes a bug that caused this prefix to show up in the user interface when you clicked the (...) button in various places to browse for a folder. PowerGREP’s manifest now includes longPathAware to indicate PowerGREP’s support for long paths. PowerGREP now checks the LongPathsEnabled registry value on Windows 10 and 11. If this value is set then PowerGREP knows that long paths no longer need a prefix at all. This makes handling long paths a tiny bit more efficient.
A couple of crash bugs have been fixed. Previous releases could (occasionally) crash when clicking the Abort button to abort an action and when executing an action after activating the option File Selector|Search Only Through Files with Results. A bunch of other minor bugs and corner case bugs were also fixed. The version history has the complete list.
EditPad Pro 8.4.0 is now available for download.
EditPad Pro’s built-in FTP support has received a significant overhaul. The main goal was to remove the dependency on OpenSSL. These DLLs are no longer included with EditPad Pro 8.4.0. The installer will remove them from EditPad Pro’s installation folder if you upgrade from a previous 8.x.x release to 8.4.0. Our main motivation for removing OpenSSL is that some companies have policies against these DLLs because of security concerns or open source policies. EditPad Pro 7 and previous 8.x.x releases do work correctly if you delete these DLLs, but then lose SSL and TLS support.
In the Connect To FTP dialog, you can now select the IP version. Selecting “IPv4” gives you the behavior of previous EditPad versions which only supported IPv4. The new default is “auto” which lets you connect to both IPv4 and IPv6 servers. You can also select “IPv6” to use IPv6 with host names that have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
In the Connect To FTP dialog, the “TLS, if available” encryption option has been removed. This was a useful option at a time when most FTP servers did not support TLS. With this option you could use TLS if the server happened to support it, but otherwise just fall back to plain FTP. If TLS support was added to the server later, EditPad would automatically start using it. Now that TLS support is far more common, it’s better to select one of the “Explicit TLS” options if you know the server supports TLS. This way you won’t unknowingly end up with an unencrypted connection if TLS support is later disabled on the server, either by a bumbling administrator or an attacker.
The “SSL” encryption options have been renamed to “Implicit TLS“. Their functionality is unchanged. Even in EditPad 8.3.x the “SSL” option could use TLS 1.0, 1.1, or 1.2. The only difference between implicit TLS and explicit TLS is the way the connection to the server is established. Explicit TLS is most common these days. What is now called “implicit TLS” was used during the days of SSL, before TLS existed. Hence the labeling in previous versions of EditPad.
The “SSH” encryption option has been removed. What this did was to create an encrypted tunnel to the server via SSH and then make a plain FTP connection through the tunnel. This too was useful at a time when most FTP servers did not support TLS. If a server supported SSH (but not SFTP) and FTP (but not TLS) this combination still allowed encrypted file transfers. Now you’ll need to either select SFTP (SSH’s file transfer method) or one of the TLS options.
TLS 1.3 is now supported. TLS 1.2, 1.1, 1.0, and SSL 3.0 are still supported. Support for SSL 2.0, which was deprecated in 2011, has been removed.
The same changes have been made to the encryption options for SMTP connections in Options|Preferences|Email. SMTP via TLS too no longer depends on the OpenSSL DLLs.
The POP-before-SMTP option was removed from Options|Preferences|Email. Once upon a time, when SMTP servers did not support authentication, some email providers required people to check their email (via POP) before they could send email. These days, most SMTP servers require direct authentication.
FTP and SFTP (SSH) connections can now go through a proxy server. HTTP, SOCKSv4, and SOCKSv5 protocols are supported. The Connect to FTP dialog has a button for configuring the proxy. The proxy settings apply to all FTP and SFTP connections. The FTP proxy settings are separate from the proxy settings for HTTP connections that EditPad uses for things like downloading spell check dictionaries or custom schemes in the file type configuration.
You can now select a different font face and font size for the main menu. The same font is also used by drop-down menus, context menus and toolbar buttons that have text labels such as the search options. To change the font, right-click the main menu or any toolbar and select Menu Font in the context menu.
You can select a different font face and font size for the status bar by clicking the new button in Options|Preferences|Status Bar. The status bar will automatically adjust its height and the width of its indicators to the size of your chosen font.
EditPad Lite 8.4.0 is now available for download.
You can now select a different font face and font size for the main menu. The same font is also used by drop-down menus, context menus and toolbar buttons that have text labels such as the search options. To change the font, right-click the main menu or any toolbar and select Menu Font in the context menu.
DeployMaster 7.1.1 is now available for download.
An installer built with DeployMaster contains a number of core files that the installer needs to be able to show itself, before the actual installation begins. This includes the installation program itself plus the files that you specify on the Project and Appearance pages. On the Project page you can add an icon, readme file, license agreement, and support DLLs. On the Appearance page you can specify a background bitmap. The total allowed size of these files has been increased from 3 MB to 10 MB. This gives you space for larger images or DLLs. If you chose a compression method on the Media page, then it’s the total size after compression that matters.
As a consequence, on the Media page, the option to split the setup files into multiple files of a certain size now has 10 MB as the minimum split limit. This ensures that the first piece of the installer contains all the core files. These days 10 MB is a small download. So a 10 MB minimum size should still be below any file size limitations of any file transfer sites that you may want to use to send your installer to your users.
AceText 4.1.0 is now available for download.
Two options were added to the Appearance Preferences.
The checkbox labeled “Control+Wheel changes the font size instead of scrolling one page” lets you choose what happens when you rotate the mouse wheel while holding down the Control key with the mouse hovering over an edit control. If unchecked, the editor scrolls its contents up or down by as many lines as fit in the editor’s height. This lets you scroll rapidly through long clips. If checked, the editor increases or decreases its font size, effectively zooming its contents.
Turn on “show line numbers on physical lines only” to only show a line number on a line if the previous line ended with a line break. This way line numbers do not change when lines are broken up by Word Wrap. Turn it off to show line numbers for all lines. Use the Line Numbers item in the Options menu to toggle whether line numbers are shown at all.
Turning off the “show toolbars” option now only hides the main toolbar and the collection toolbar. It no longer hides the main menu or the Search toolbar. Turning the option back on again no longer positions the main menu incorrectly.
The Collection toolbar has many more buttons in AceText 4 than in AceText 3. We omitted the Delete Clip button to try to keep the number of buttons manageable. That button is now back by popular demand. But, if you use both the AceText Tower and the AceText Editor then the buttons for duplicating, moving, and deleting clips are now only available on the AceText Tower, above the clip tree. You’ll be using those buttons while selecting clips in the clip tree anyway. It leaves more space on the Collection toolbar on the AceText Editor for editing commands, even when the AceText editor is tucked into a corner to leave space for another application.
Pressing Ctrl+F to move keyboard focus to the Search box now selects the existing search term, as it did in AceText 3. This allows you to immediately replace the search term by entering a new search term.
Even when Automatic Capture is enabled, AceText cannot capture clips if the ClipHistory is locked with a password. AceText now flashes the Lock icon in the notification area when this happens, reminding you to unlock the collection. You can still turn off Automatic Capture to stop the icon from flashing.
When you tick the Parameters checkbox, AceText substitutes parameters in the form of %PARAM% when it send a clip to another application. A number of built-in parameters were added.
%CURWEEK% and %CLIPWEEK% insert the number of the week of the current year and of the clip’s year. If these are followed by %CURYEAR% or %CLIPYEAR% then those represent the year that the week started in. So if the clip’s date is January 1st, 2022, which was on a Saturday, then %CLIPWEEK%/%CLIPYEAR% is substituted with 52/2021. AceText follows the ISO 8601 standard which sees Monday as the first day of the week and up to the first 3 days of the week as part of the previous year if January 1st is on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.
%CURYMD% and %CLIPYMD% insert the current date and the clip’s date in YYYYMMDD format. This format allows a numeric sort to sort the dates correctly. Many existing placeholders for date and time parts have new counterparts with an extra Z. Those insert the number with a leading zero if it is less than 10. %CURDAY% inserts the day of the month as a number between 1 and 31. %CURDAYZ% inserts a number between 01 and 31.
When the Paramters checkbox is checked, AceText now interprets the double percentage sign %% as a single literal percentage sign. To make this clear it is highlighted with the same color as escaped literals in regular expressions. The color uses a gray background by default. A single literal % that is not part of a placeholder name is still treated as a literal % like before. It’s not highlighted as it doesn’t get any special treatment.
This change can cause some of your clips to paste differently now. In the past, pasting a clip containing %%CURYEAR%% would paste as %2022%, treating %CURYEAR% as a parameter and the single % signs before and after it as literals. Now it pastes as %CURYEAR%, treating the %% pairs as literal % signs, leaving CURYEAR as literal text in between. This is also the purpose of this change. You can easily include %PARAM% as literal text in a clip in which other parameters need to be substituted by including it as %%PARAM%%. In older versions of AceText you’d have to use something like %PCT%PARAM%PCT% and add a second clip to your collection with %PCT% as the label and a literal % as its contents so that %PCT% would be substituted with a literal % leaving PARAM as literal text. If you used this technique in the past then those clips will still be pasted the same way. %CURYEAR%%CURMONTHZ% will still be pasted as 202202. The clip is scanned from left to right for parameters. So %CURYEAR% is matched first. Its trailing % is then no longer available to be paired with the next %, so they aren’t seen as a literal %.
We’ve been getting a lot of questions whether the recently discovered security problems with Log4j affect any of our products. The simple answer is: no.
Log4j is a logging utility for Java. None of our products are or have ever been developed with Java. So we cannot and do not use Log4j.
The free trial and licensed downloads of our products do not include any kind of logging facility at all. We don’t think that it is necessary or desirable for a properly tested release build of a software product to routinely keep logs. We think the best way to avoid the potential privacy and security issues with end user software keeping logs is to simply not log anything at all.
Logs can be very useful for testing and debugging purposes. If you report a bug in one of our products that we can’t easily reproduce, we may invite you to download a special debug build of the software. This debug build includes a bug logging facility that writes a debug log to a local file on your PC whenever an unexpected error occurs. The logging facility is not able to connect to the internet. You decide whether you want to send us the log file, and whether you run the debug build in the first place.
RegexBuddy 4.13.0 is now available for download.
This release brings RegexBuddy up-to-date with all the applications that it supports. Newly supported versions are Boost 1.77, C++Builder 11, Delphi 11, Java 17, PCRE 8.45, PCRE2 10.37, PHP 8.0.11, Python 3.10, and R 4.0.11.
ECMAScript 2018 added named capture groups to the JavaScript standard. All the browsers that RegexBuddy emulates except for MSIE have since implemented this. RegexBuddy now allows named capturing groups in JavaScript regular expressions when you select a flavor other than MSIE. RegexBuddy also supports the rr`$<name>` syntax for backreferences in the replacement string that is newly invented by ECMAScript 2018. RegexBuddy also correctly emulates the fact that JavaScript only recognizes named backreferences in the replacement text if the regular expression actually contains one or more named capturing groups. On the Use panel, RegexBuddy can now generate a JavaScript code snippet to retrieve the match of a named capturing group.
RegexBuddy is now aware that empty positive lookahead is an error in Boost instead of always matching a zero-length string and that in older versions of Boost empty negative lookahead was an error instead of always failing to match.
RegexMagic 2.12.0 is now available for download.
This release brings RegexMagic up-to-date with all the applications that it supports. Newly supported versions are Boost 1.77, C++Builder 11, Delphi 11, Java 17, PCRE 8.45, PCRE2 10.37, PHP 8.0.11, Python 3.10, and R 4.0.11.
ECMAScript 2018 added named capture groups to the JavaScript standard. All the browsers that RegexMagic supports except for MSIE have since implemented this. RegexMagic now uses named capturing groups when generating regular expressions targeting any browser other than MSIE. On the Use panel, RegexMagic can now generate a JavaScript code snippet to retrieve the match of a named capturing group.
HelpScribble 8.3.1 is now available for download.
HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor now supports Delphi 11 Alexandria and C++Builder 11 Alexandria. HelpScribble’s installer will automatically install it if it detects that you have Delphi 11 Alexandria or C++Builder 11 Alexandria installed. HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor can assign HelpContext properties to controls in VCL applications and Multi-Device applications.
One of the headline features of Delphi and C++Builder 11 Alexandria is that the IDE now supports per-monitor DPI scaling so everything looks crisp on high resolution displays. HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor also supports per-monitor DPI scaling when installed into Delphi and C++Builder 11 Alexandria.
HelpScribble itself continues to support the system DPI scaling that was introduced in version 8.0.0. This means HelpScribble itself looks perfectly crisp on the primary monitor and on secondary monitors that use the same scaling percentage as the primary monitor. On secondary monitors that use a different scaling percentage it may look blurry (but will still be sized correctly).
On the Compiler page in Project Options there is a button to have HelpScribble search your computer’s drives for the help compilers that HelpScribble needs to create HLP or CHM files. This search process has been improved.