HelpScribble 8.3.2 is now available for download.
HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor now supports Delphi 12 Athens and C++Builder 12 Athens. HelpScribble’s installer will automatically install it if it detects that you have Delphi 12 Athens or C++Builder 12 Athens installed. HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor can assign HelpContext properties to controls in VCL applications and Multi-Device applications.
HelpScribble’s documentation has been updated to explain that Windows 11 fully supports HTML Help and does not support WinHelp at all, just like Windows 10. HelpScribble itself required no changes to support Windows 11.
A bug has been fixed that caused HelpScribble to show a “list index out of bounds (0)” error when closing HelpScribble or switching to another application. It only happened after using the spell checker and you used one of but not both of the Learn and Learn Replace buttons in the spell checker since first downloading the spell check dictionary. These buttons add words to the user word list. The Learn button adds words to be considered as spelled correctly. The Learn Replace button adds words to be automatically replaced with other words. You can edit the list of learned words and replacements via the Word List button in the spell checker.
Back in version 8.0.0 we gave HelpScribble a fresh coat of paint by way of new toolbar icons. Since then the buttons with arrows in the Browse Sequence Editor had their arrows pointing the wrong way. We’ve flipped them back in the right direction now.
RegexMagic 2.13.1 is now available for download.
RegexMagic now officially supports .NET 7, Boost 1.83, Java 21, Python 3.12, and Ruby 3.2. These regex flavors are unchanged compared with previous versions.
RegexBuddy 4.14.1 is now available for download.
RegexBuddy now officially supports .NET 7.0, Boost 1.83, Java 21, Python 3.12, and Ruby 3.2. These regex flavors are unchanged compared with previous versions.
RegexBuddy now correctly emulates that the JGsoft flavor which is used in our own products PowerGREP, EditPad, and AceText is the only one that correctly matches a Unicode grapheme with \X when it is used inside a lookbehind. Java always fails to match \X when it’s inside a lookbehind, possibly causing a negative lookbehind to succeed. All other flavors either don’t support \X at all or don’t support lookbehind at all or treat \X as an error inside lookbehind because they don’t support tokens that match a variable number of characters inside lookbehind.
The behavior of \G differs between regex flavors. With some flavors it matches at the position where the previous match ended or at the start of the string if there is no previous match. With other flavors it matches at the position where the current match attempt began. The difference is important when the previous match was zero-length. Some flavors advance one character through the string after a zero-length match was found before starting the next match attempt. Then the end of the previous match and the start of the current attempt aren’t at the same position. RegexBuddy 4 has always correctly emulated this when highlighting matches and listing matches on the Test panel. But the Debug panel sometimes showed different results. This has been fixed. The Debug panel now correctly shows how \G behaves in your selected regex flavor regardless of whether you’re debugging a single match attempt or all match attempts. If you debug a match that is highlighted on the Test panel then the match attempt on the Debug panel takes into account what the preceding match was on the Test panel.
RegexBuddy now correctly handles conditionals inside lookbehind for the flavors that allow this. The direction of the conditional (lookahead or lookbehind) does not change when it’s inside another lookbehind.
EditPad Lite 8.4.2 is now available for download.
The editor’s performance while scrolling the text has been improved. You’ll particularly notice this if you have a mouse with a stepless scroll wheel. The editor will now keep up with the wheel no matter how fast you rotate it.
Various minor bugs and issues have been fixed. Edit|Delete Line now properly deletes the last line in the file when the cursor is after the last line break in the file. When customizing the palette in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax, the color pickers are now restricted to solarized, harmonized, or monochrome colors when editing such palettes. The Editor: Control Characters color is now applied to control characters that are visualized as IBM PC glyphs or Unicode control pictures when using a complex script text layout (just like it already was when using a left-to-right text layout). Help|Create Portable Installation now copies over the lists with learned words and learned replacements for each selected spell checker dictionary.
EditPad Lite 8 is now available in Dutch, English, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. Many thanks to our users who helped us to update these translations. If you’d like to help with making EditPad Lite 8 available in your own language, please email us.
EditPad Pro 8.4.2 is now available for download.
The editor’s performance while scrolling the text has been improved. You’ll particularly notice this if you have a mouse with a stepless scroll wheel. The editor will now keep up with the wheel no matter how fast you rotate it.
Several fixes were made to the Extra|Compare Files feature. Lines highlighted as added or removed now use the text color specified in the palette instead of the plain text color when the file doesn’t have a syntax coloring scheme. The dialog for selecting the file to compare with now automatically widens the Full Path column in the list of files when you widen the dialog and no longer allows you to make the dialog so small that there is no space for the comparison options. If the only difference between the two files is that blank lines were added or removed then option to “ignore added and removed lines” now triggers the message “The files are identical, except perhaps for differences you have selected to ignore” instead of displaying a comparison with no actual differences. Comparing two files with “ignore added and removed lines” turned off and then comparing them again with the option turned off now removes the file comparison marks from blank lines in the original files when highlighting changes in the original files. Loading a file was saved with comparison info and then edited or truncated outside EditPad Pro to make the comparison info incomplete is now loaded without the comparison info instead of failing with an access violation error.
Various minor bugs and issues have been fixed. Edit|Copy as HTML or RTF no longer adds double line breaks to the HTML or RTF when you copy CRLF line breaks from a file using one of the JSON syntax coloring schemes. Search|Find on Disk now correctly opens or adds files in which only zero-length regular expression matches can be found. Edit|Delete Line now properly deletes the last line in the file when the cursor is after the last line break in the file. When customizing the palette in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax, the color pickers are now restricted to solarized, harmonized, or monochrome colors when editing such palettes. The Editor: Control Characters color is now applied to control characters that are visualized as IBM PC glyphs or Unicode control pictures when using a complex script text layout (just like it already was when using a left-to-right text layout). Help|Create Portable Installation now copies over the lists with learned words and learned replacements for each selected spell checker dictionary.
EditPad Pro 8 is now available in Dutch, English, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. Many thanks to our users who helped us to update these translations. If you’d like to help with making EditPad Pro 8 available in your own language, please email us.
AceText 4.2.2 is now available for download.
AceText 4.0.0 introduced the Options|Dark Theme menu item that lets you switch AceText between the standard (white) Windows theme and AceText’s new dark theme. Doing so unfortunately caused AceText to lose its connection to the Windows clipboard. This caused the ClipHistory to stop capturing text copied to the clipboard. Toggling the Operation|Automatic Capture menu item did not fix this. It also caused AcePaste and AceType to incorrectly paste “before and after” clips. The only workaround was to shut down AceText and restart it. This has now been fixed so that you can switch themes at any time and have the ClipHistory and all other features continue working normally.
AceText 4.0.0 also introduced the ability to export collections into plain text, comma-delimited, tab-delimited, or HTML files. This release fixes several bugs that caused errors or caused only some of the clips to be exported with certain combinations of settings in the Export Collection dialog. If AceText needs more than 1 second to export the collection, which it may when exporting many thousands of clips into separate files, then it now shows a progress meter. This makes sure AceText does not appear unresponsive or hung. The progress meter has an Abort button that stops AceText from exporting any further clips. Aborting the export does not delete any files that were already exported.
Several other minor bugs were also fixed. The version history has the complete list.
PowerGREP 5.3.3 is now available for download.
This release brings a bunch of minor fixes and improvements.
On the Action panel, if you set “action type” to “list files” or to “file or folder name search” then the “target file creation” setting has two options to convert (copies of) matched files to text. When searching through files in proprietary formats such as PDF or Office files that PowerGREP converts to plain text prior to searching you can use these target types to write that plain text conversion to file. This release fixes a bug that caused the “convert matched files to text” option to overwrite the original file without adding a .txt extension but to note the file with the .txt extension in the Undo History. As a result, if you undid the action, the original file would be restored from the backup with the .txt extension. For example after converting original.pdf and undoing the action you’d have original.pdf still as the plain text conversion and original.pdf.txt as the original PDF file. You’d have to rename all your PDF files to remove the .txt extension to properly undo the action. This issue has been fixed. Now, after executing the action the original PDF will remain as original.pdf and the plain text conversion will be saved as original.pdf.txt. Undoing the action will remove original.pdf.txt or restore it from its backup if it existed before the action. The original PDF remains as original.pdf. The “convert copies of matched files” to text option was not affected by this bug. It correctly saved the plain text conversion with an additional .txt extension if your target file location settings resulted in a path with an extension such as .pdf that would make PowerGREP interpret the file as being in a proprietary format. Exactly which extensions that applies to depends on the “file formats to convert to plain text” setting on the File Selector panel.
When searching through plain text files, the same two options to convert (copies of) matched files to text can be used to change the encoding and/or line break style of the matched files. It also lets you add or remove a the byte order marker to/from Unicode text files. The settings in the text encoding configuration on the File Selector panel determine whether PowerGREP writes or does not write the BOM when creating or overwriting a file. If you turn off the option to preserve the presence or absence of the BOM then you can force PowerGREP to always or never write a BOM. PowerGREP takes this into account when converting files to plain text and will rewrite the file with or without the BOM even when you’re not otherwise changing the encoding or line break style. New in version 5.3.3 is that if the file already has the desired encoding, line break style, and BOM (or lack thereof or the encoding is not Unicode) then PowerGREP no longer overwrites a plain text file with the exact same contents when the target type is to convert matched files to plain text. This speeds up actions and avoids changes to last modification dates when only some of the files in your action actually need to be modified to meet your requirements for encoding, line break style, or BOM.
On the File Selector panel, you can type or paste a path into the Path box to navigate to a path. This happens automatically as you enter the path. There’s no need to press Enter. Pressing Enter no longer produces a “ding” sound. When entering a UNC path in the form of \\server\share\ PowerGREP waits until you’ve entered the 4th backslash before it tries to connect to the network share. This avoids network delays in finding network shares that don’t exist (because you hadn’t completely entered the share’s name yet). Now PowerGREP allows dollar signs in UNC server names so that paths like \\wsl$\Ubuntu\ are recognized as valid UNC paths.
By default, PowerGREP acts as if files that look like backup copies or working copies and folders that look like they hold version control information don’t exist at all. They don’t show up on the File Selector panel and are never included in any actions. You can control which files and/or folders are hidden from PowerGREP via the “hide files and folders” setting on the File Selector panel. The predefined configurations with “versioning” in their name previously hid .svn folders used by Subversion. These predefined configurations have been updated to also hide the git, .hg, and .bzr folders used by the Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar version control systems.
This change only affects the predefined configurations when you first install PowerGREP 5. If you’re upgrading from a previous 5.x.x to 5.3.3 and you want to have the new predefined configurations, click the (...) button next to “hide files and folders“. Delete all the configurations and click OK. Instead of leaving you with no configurations, PowerGREP will now restore the default configurations for hiding files and folders. Alternatively, if you have custom configurations that you want to keep, you can edit the configurations and replace ^\.svn$ with ^\.(svn|git|hg|bzr)$ in the “hide folders” file masks.
Note that if you have previously saved a file selection or an action (which includes a file selection) then that saved file selection will continue to use the exact same “hide files and folders” configuration that it was saved with, even if there is a new predefined configuration with different settings. The file selection saves and loads all the settings in the configuration, not just its name. If there is a configuration with the same name but different settings when you load a file selection then the loaded configuration will be added temporarily to the “hide files and folders” drop-down list with a (2) next to its name. This mechanism ensures that previously saved file selections and actions continue to work exactly as they worked before. To update a file selection to a new configuration, simply select the new configuration from the “hide files and folders” drop-down list and save the file selection.
PowerGREP cannot search through password-protected files. If a PDF file is protected with a password then PowerGREP now adds an error to the Results panel saying the PDF is password-protected instead of an error saying “PDF conversion error“. PowerGREP already did this for other file formats such as Office files.
DeployMaster 7.2.0 is now available for download.
On the Platform page you can now select a specific range of Windows 11 updates that your installer is compatible with. Presently the options are “21H2 (Original Release)“, “22H2 (2022 Update)“, and “all future updates“. The default range is from “original release” to “all future updates” which makes your installer run on Windows 11 without checking the specific Windows 11 version the user has. If your application depends on new features made available in a Windows 11 update then you can set that update as the minimum version. If you make an older version of your application available for users who haven’t updated their Windows 11 (yet) then you can restrict your installer to older builds of Windows 11 so that people who did update their Windows 11 don’t accidentally install the older version.
In addition, you can still select the specific range of Windows 10 updates that your installer is compatible with, independently of the Windows 11 setting. So you can make a single installer that will run on Windows 10 and Windows 11 but requires specific updates for Windows 10 and/or Windows 11. “22H2 (2022 Update)” is now also an option for Windows 10. Microsoft has given the latest updates for Windows 10 and 11 the same label. But DeployMaster is aware that the internal build numbers are different and correctly checks those. So you could choose to support Windows 11 22H2 but not Windows 10 22H2, for example.
DeployMaster itself uses the Windows 10 and 11 version restrictions when you use the options on the 3rd party page to make your application require a specific version of the (classic) .NET Framework. .NET 4.6 and later require specific updates to work on Windows 10. .NET 4.8.1 is now also supported.
DeployMaster itself now includes the following additional languages that you can select as such on the Language page: “Français“, “Português-BR“, “Deutsch“, and “Español“. If you had previously added a language with exactly one of these names then DeployMaster’s installer will not overwrite your custom translation. The new language files are also available in the DeployMaster Language Pack which you can download separately from DeployMaster’s web site. You can use the latest language pack with DeployMaster 6.x.x and 7.x.x.