AceText 4.2.1 is now available for download.
This release brings a number of bug fixes.
In AceText 4.2.0 we added a New Subfolder button next to the New Folder button to give you more ways to add the new folder where you want it without having to move the added folder. We changed the behavior of the New Folder button to always add the new folder as a sibling of the selected folder. Unfortunately, we also introduced a new bug. The New Folder button would fail with a “list index out of bounds” error when used on a collection that was entirely empty. This has been fixed. Both the New Folder and New Subfolder buttons can be used now to add a new folder to an empty collection.
Using the Collection|Read Only menu item to turn off read-only mode for a collection now counts as the collection having been used at that moment. This ensures that the option to automatically make collections read-only after a certain period of inactivity that we added to the Files Preferences in AceText 4.2.0 will not immediately make the collection read-only again if you hadn’t otherwise interacted with that collection.
Using the Paste As New Clip button when a clip is selected now respects the sort order of the folder or collection containing the selected clip when inserting the pasted clip.
The Search box at the bottom of the AceText Editor is now properly synchronized between the Clipboard tab and the other tabs, between the Clipboard tab and the AceText Tower, and between the Clipboard tab and RegexBuddy or RegexMagic when launching those applications from AceText.
RegexMagic 2.13.0 is now available for download.
RegexMagic now fully supports Boost 1.80, Java 19, .NET 7.0, PCRE2 10.39, PHP 8.1.12, Python 3.11, R 4.2.1, and Visual C++ 2022.
One of RegexMagic’s many patterns is one to generate regexes that match the VAT numbers of one or more European countries. This pattern now has an additional option for Northern Ireland to match VAT numbers with the XI prefix.
ECMAScript 2018 added the /s regex flag to the JavaScript standard to turn on dot matches line breaks mode. All the browsers that RegexMagic can target except for MSIE have since implemented this. RegexMagic has supported this since version 2.8.0 when Chrome was the first browser to implement this. Regexes generated by RegexMagic may use this mode if you use a pattern to match “anything“. But when copying your regex as a JavaScript operator or when generating a JavaScript source code snippet on the Use panel, previous versions of RegexMagic did not add the /s to the JavaScript operator. Now RegexMagic does so when it indicates on the Regex panel that “dot matches line breaks” is a required mode for the regex to work as intended.
RegexMagic 2.7.0 through 2.12.0 crash on startup when you try to run them on WINE 7.0. The problem does not occur when running these versions of RegexMagic on older versions of WINE. RegexMagic 2.13.0 now catches this error allowing it to start normally on WINE 7.0.
RegexBuddy 4.14.0 is now available for download.
RegexBuddy now fully supports Boost 1.80, Java 19, .NET 7.0, PCRE2 10.39, PHP 8.1.12, Python 3.11, R 4.2.1, and Visual C++ 2022.
ECMAScript 2018 added the /s regex flag to the JavaScript standard to turn on dot matches line breaks mode. All the browsers that RegexBuddy emulates except for MSIE have since implemented this. RegexBuddy has emulated this since version 4.9.0 when Chrome was the first browser to implement this. But when copying your regex as a JavaScript operator or when generating a JavaScript source code snippet on the Use panel, previous versions of RegexBuddy did not add the /s flag. Now RegexBuddy adds the /s flag if you have selected “dot matches line breaks” mode in RegexBuddy. Conversely, if you’ve copied a JavaScript regex operator from your source code, selecting Paste from JavaScript operator in RegexBuddy now toggles “dot matches line breaks” mode depending on whether the operator you copied includes the /s flag or not.
JavaScript and R support character escapes such as \n in literal strings. They do not support them as part of the replacement string syntax. So if you add a replacement string as a literal to your source code then you can use \n to represent a line feed. But if your script receives a replacement string from user input or elsewhere then \n is not interpreted as a line feed. RegexBuddy can emulate this distinction. Select “support string syntax” if you’ll be pasting your replacement into your source code. Select “regex syntax only” if you will store the replacement in a data file or will paste it into an input control. RegexBuddy has supported this since version 4.0.0. But due to a bug, if you selected “regex syntax only” and then copied the regex as a JavaScript or R string or generated a source code snippet then the \n was not escaped to prevent it from being interpreted as the string literal. This has been fixed. Conversely, when pasting a JavaScript or R string both \\n and \n are now interpreted correctly. Pasting a string containing \n now switches RegexBuddy to “support string syntax” mode. All of this also applies to all other character escapes supported by JavaScript and R string literals.
Two crash bugs were also fixed. They were triggered by some very specific regex syntax. One occurred with regexes containing a character class range with an escape representing the NULL character such as [\0-\x1F] if the selected application allows such ranges (some regex flavors only allow letters and digits in character class ranges). The other occurred with regexes such as a$b$c that contain multiple dollar signs if the selected application (such as GNU BRE) treats the $ as a literal instead of as an anchor when the $ is not a the end of the regex or a group.
RegexBuddy 4.8.0 through 4.13.0 crash on startup when you try to run them on WINE 7.0. The problem does not occur when running these versions of RegexBuddy on older versions of WINE. RegexBuddy 4.14.0 now catches this error allowing it to start normally on WINE 7.0.
EditPad Pro 8.4.1 is now available for download.
In the Open Files Preferences you can choose whether EditPad Pro should automatically reload files that have been modified on disk. One of the options is to reload all files in the active project when you switch from another application back to EditPad. The benefit of this option is that EditPad then only needs to show a single prompt to reload all the modified files if another application modified multiple files in your project and those files have unsaved changes in EditPad or you’ve configured EditPad to always reload. Due to a bug, if you enabled this option and it happened that the active file was the only one that was modified on disk then EditPad would not reload the file when switching from another application to EditPad. You could work around it by also turning on the option to reload the active file. Then the file would be reloaded when switching between tabs in EditPad. Now that this bug has been fixed EditPad will correctly reload the active file when switching from another application to EditPad if you have either or both of these two options enabled.
EditPad Pro’s built-in FTP support received a significant overhaul in version 8.4.0. The main goal was to remove the dependency on OpenSSL. These DLLs are no longer included with EditPad Pro. Their presence was sometimes a hurdle for EditPad Pro to be used in enterprises with strict policies on open source software or with concerns about the regular findings of security vulnerabilities in OpenSSL (which nearly always didn’t affect EditPad Pro because it didn’t use the affected features of OpenSSL).
EditPad Pro 8.4.1 brings some minor updates to its reworked FTP support. In particular, EditPad Pro 8.4.0 could not connect to FTP servers such as WS_FTP that return a 503 error if the SYST command is sent before logging in. EditPad Pro 8.4.1 now ignores this error and resents the SYST command after logging in.
In the Cursors Preferences you can choose to allow the cursor to move beyond the end of the line. When enabled, pressing the right arrow key at the end of the line moves the cursor further to the right instead of to the start of the next line. The cursor keeps it horizontal position when you move it up or down to a shorter line instead of jumping to the end of that line.
EditPad Pro 8.2.0 added additional options to the Cursors Preferences to control the precise behavior of the Home and End keys. You can now choose whether and how these keys deal with word wrapping and with leading or trailing whitespace. Unfortunately, a new bug was introduced. Regardless of which options you chose for the Home or End keys, if you enabled the option to allow the cursor beyond the end of the line then the Home key did nothing if the cursor was on a line that was completely blank (no spaces or any other characters on that line). The End key did work normally. This bug has now been fixed so the Home key works as expected on empty lines.
EditPad Lite 8.4.1 is now available for download.
Since version 7.0.0, EditPad has supported bidirectional text editing to allow proper editing of files with text in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew as well as files that mix these with text in left-to-right scripts. You can enable this by choosing one of the complex script text layouts via the Options|Text Layouts menu. Choose a left-to-right complex script layout if most of your text is left-to-right. Choose a right-to-left complex script text layout if most of your text is right-to-left. You can select the default for each file type on the Editor page in the file type configuration.
Normally, the vertical scrollbar is positioned at the ends of the lines. So for left-to-right text the scrollbar sits at the right hand side, while for right-to-left text it should sit at the left hand side. EditPad 8.0.0 introduced a bug that caused the scrollbar to stay where it was when using the Options|Text Layouts menu to change the text direction. You had to switch between tabs for EditPad to move the scrollbar. This bug has been fixed. The scrollbar moves immediately when you change between text layouts with a different base text direction.
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.
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.
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.