RegexBuddy 5.0.4 is now available for download.
This release fixes one bug that we missed in RegexBuddy 5.0.3. This version was likely to crash upon startup with a “runtime error 217” on Windows 11 if “Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support” is enabled in the regional settings in Windows. What this setting really does is to force UTF-8 on non-Unicode applications. In principle, this setting does not impact applications such as RegexBuddy that are Unicode applications. But, RegexBuddy uses the system code page when it emulates non-Unicode regex engines. RegexBuddy 5.0.3 erroneously tried to use UTF-8 for non-Unicode regex engines when “Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support” was enabled in Windows 11. RegexBuddy 5.0.4 falls back on the thread locale to determine which Windows encoding to use for non-Unicode regex engines just like RegexBuddy 5.0.2 and prior did. That means code page 1252 when a Western European language such as English is selected in the regional settings in Windows.
RegexBuddy 5.0.3 is now available for download.
RegexBuddy 5’s regex engine fully supports all Unicode characters and all versions of Unicode so that it can use the same version of Unicode as the application or programming language you’re targeting. RegexBuddy 5 also knows and emulates that this application may have flaws or limitations in its Unicode support. Regex engines such as Boost, .NET, JavaScript without /u, and Python 2.x work with 16-bit characters. This creates issues with “astral characters” (code points U+10000 and beyond) that are represented by surrogate pairs in UTF-16. Now, the Create panel explains how this affects quantifiers on literal astral characters. For example, it will say that 😎+ “repeats only the low surrogate U+DE0E instead of the whole surrogate pair U+D83D U+DE0E that represents the astral character “😎” (U+1F60E)“. With these engines the regex ^😎+$ cannot match 😎😎 but would match the invalid sequence U+D83D U+DE0E U+DE0E U+DE0E. In Helpful mode, RegexBuddy now treats such quantifiers as an error. The workaround is to use ^(?:😎)+$ so the surrogate pair is repeated as a whole. RegexBuddy automatically makes this change for you if you double-click the regex tree node that says only the low surrogate is repeated.
This release also fixes a bunch of bugs. All of these were introduced in RegexBuddy 5.0.0. Selecting Paste Regex from XML or Paste Replacement from XML under the Paste button on the main toolbar now once again correctly handles numeric character references in the XML. The hide files and folders settings on the GREP page in the Preferences are once again applied correctly. The Test panel once again highlights visualized line breaks when they are part of regex matches. Several fixes were made to complex script text layouts that are needed to support right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew and syllabic scripts such as the various Indic scripts. A regex such as (?x) (?i)a| (?i)b in which the first alternative starts with free whitespace and a local mode modifier no longer cause RegexBuddy to become unresponsive.
When you select PostgreSQL as your application in RegexBuddy 5, it gives you “default“, “extended“, and “basic” flavor choices. The “advanced” flavor choice was removed. PostgreSQL uses the “advanced” flavor by default and does not provide a way to explicitly set it. Selecting “advanced” causes errors on the Use panel in RegexBuddy. You can now select “default” to use the advanced flavor and get correct code snippets. RegexBuddy 4 did not offer a flavor choice for PostgreSQL. It only supported the “advanced” flavor.
One older bug was also fixed. The regex (?(DEFINE)([a-z]+))(?1)(?![0-9]) has a subroutine call to a group that is inside a DEFINE group. The subroutine ends with a quantifier. On the Test panel this regex failed to backtrack this trailing quantifier when the part after the subroutine call failed to match and the chosen regex flavor allows backtracking into subroutine calls. As a result, the Test panel did not highlight the match ab that this regex should find in the string abc4.
DeployMaster 7.6.0 is now available for download.
This release adds support for Windows 11 version 25H2 otherwise known as the 2025 Update. You can now select this version on the Platform page if you want to restrict your installer to specific Windows 11 versions.
DeployMaster has always had the option to completely cover the screen background on the Appearance page. This gives your installer the gradient-filled background that was typical for installation software on the Windows platform in the 1990s and 2000s. The feature is off by default as it has gone out of fashion, but it remains available if that is still your style.
But covering the whole screen with a background image is still common for installers for games and other entertainment software. DeployMaster now supports this. After ticking the checkbox to completely cover the screen background, click the new Change Wallpaper button to select your background image. After selecting the wallpaper image you have 4 options to determine how it should fill the screen: fill, fit, stretch, or tile. These work the same as the options that Windows itself gives for its desktop wallpaper. Note that your installer’s wallpaper is only displayed by the installer. The user’s desktop wallpaper is never changed.
The Change Logo Image replaces the Change Bitmap button. It still allows you to select an image file to be displayed in the top left corner of your installer’s background. We renamed it because you can now use an image in PNG, JPEG, GIF, or TIFF format when building installers targeting Windows XP or later. You can still use a bitmap in BMP format when targeting any version of Windows. But the modern image formats are more efficient and PNG and GIF allow for proper transparency. Your installer overlays the logo on the gradient background or wallpaper image. The wallpaper image can use these same file formats. If the wallpaper image has transparent areas or if you choose the “fit” method that leaves horizontal or vertical bars then the color gradient will appear in the areas not covered by the wallpaper. You can change the top and bottom colors to both be black (or any other color) to remove the gradient (or use a solid color).
Deep in the regional settings in Windows 11 there is a checkbox that Microsoft labeled “Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support“. If this is checked on the user’s installation of Windows then your installer would crash at startup on the user’s system if you built it with Windows 98 and/or Windows ME checked on the Platform page and at the same time added one or more file associations on the File Types page. Rebuilding your installer with DeployMaster 7.6.0 fixes this issue.
What the option “Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support” really does is to change the system code page for non-Unicode applications to UTF-8. This can break applications that assume the system code page to be one of the single-byte or double-byte Windows code pages. When you select Windows 98 or Windows ME on the Platform page, DeployMaster generates an installer that is a non-Unicode application because Windows 98 and ME do not support Unicode applications. When such an installer is run on a later version of Windows, including Windows 11, it runs as a non-Unicode application.
EditPad Lite 8.6.0 is now available for download.
The RegexBuddy icon on the Search toolbar, which opens RegexBuddy to edit the regular expression you’re using in EditPad, now shows the new icon for RegexBuddy 5. The actual integration is fully compatible with RegexBuddy 4 and 5.
On the Save Files you can configure EditPad to save working copies of files with unsaved changes every few minutes. The default setting is to save them every 5 minutes. Previously the actual interval was one minute longer than you specified. So by default working copies were actually saved every 6 minutes. Now actual interval is the one you specify. The minimum interval you can specify is still 1 minute. This now saves working copies every minute instead of every 2 minutes. If a file is empty in EditPad when the interval elapses, EditPad now deletes the working copy instead of saving an empty working copy.
The benefit of working copies is that they are left behind when your system crashes. When you open the file again after restarting, EditPad opens both the original file and the working copy. You can then decide whether you want to keep the unsaved changes preserved by the working copy or if you want to keep the original file. But an empty working copy doesn’t really prevent any data loss. Not saving empty working copies can reduce the number of working copies you have to deal with if your system crashes while you had a lot of files open in EditPad.
EditPad now includes two syntax coloring schemes for Visual Basic. The “Visual Basic.NET” scheme is unchanged. It works great with source code for Visual Basic 2013 and prior, including the legacy Visual Basic 6. The “Visual Basic 14 and later” scheme is new. The only difference between the two schemes is that the new scheme allows literal line breaks in strings. Visual Basic 14 changed the language specification to allow strings to span across lines. A side effect is that while you’re editing your code, any unterminated string affects the highlighting until the end of the file rather than just the remainder of the line it’s on. The same happens in Visual Studio 2015 and later. If you use literal line breaks in strings in your Visual Basic code then you can make EditPad do the same by selecting the “Visual Basic 14 and later” scheme for the “Visual Basic source code” file type on the Colors and Syntax page in the file type configuration. The original “VIsual Basic.NET” scheme is still the default.
EditPad Pro 8.6.0 is now available for download.
The RegexBuddy icon on the Search toolbar, which opens RegexBuddy to edit the regular expression you’re using in EditPad, now shows the new icon for RegexBuddy 5. The actual integration is fully compatible with RegexBuddy 4 and 5.
On the Save Files you can configure EditPad to save working copies of files with unsaved changes every few minutes. The default setting is to save them every 5 minutes. Previously the actual interval was one minute longer than you specified. So by default working copies were actually saved every 6 minutes. Now actual interval is the one you specify. The minimum interval you can specify is still 1 minute. This now saves working copies every minute instead of every 2 minutes. If a file is empty in EditPad when the interval elapses, EditPad now deletes the working copy instead of saving an empty working copy.
The benefit of working copies is that they are left behind when your system crashes. When you open the file again after restarting, EditPad opens both the original file and the working copy. You can then decide whether you want to keep the unsaved changes preserved by the working copy or if you want to keep the original file. But an empty working copy doesn’t really prevent any data loss. Not saving empty working copies can reduce the number of working copies you have to deal with if your system crashes while you had a lot of files open in EditPad.
The Editor page in the file type configuration has two options to automatically trim trailing whitespace. The “trim trailing whitespace” option trims trailing whitespace from a line you’ve edited when you move the cursor away from that line. So this happens while you’re editing your file and only affects lines that you’ve edited. The “trim all trailing whitespace upon save” trims trailing whitespace from all lines in the file, regardless of whether that whitespace was already there when you opened the file, when you save the file to disk. New in this release is that this option now also trims all trailing whitespace when you upload a file via FTP and when you save a file that was opened via FTP.
EditPad now includes two syntax coloring schemes for Visual Basic. The “Visual Basic.NET” scheme is unchanged. It works great with source code for Visual Basic 2013 and prior, including the legacy Visual Basic 6. The “Visual Basic 14 and later” scheme is new. The only difference between the two schemes is that the new scheme allows literal line breaks in strings. Visual Basic 14 changed the language specification to allow strings to span across lines. A side effect is that while you’re editing your code, any unterminated string affects the highlighting until the end of the file rather than just the remainder of the line it’s on. The same happens in Visual Studio 2015 and later. If you use literal line breaks in strings in your Visual Basic code then you can make EditPad do the same by selecting the “Visual Basic 14 and later” scheme for the “Visual Basic source code” file type on the Colors and Syntax page in the file type configuration. The original “VIsual Basic.NET” scheme is still the default.
PowerGREP 5.4.0 is now available for download.
The File Selector panel has an option to use regular expressions to define file masks instead of traditional wildcards. The hide files and folders configuration dialog has a similar option to use regular expressions to hide files and folders. All the predefined configurations for hiding files and folders use this option. These regular expressions are now case insensitive. This is more appropriate for the Windows file system which is also case insensitive. If you had actions that relied on these regular expressions being case sensitive then you can use the mode modifier (?-i) at the start of a regex to make it case sensitive.
The RegexBuddy icon on the Action toolbar, which opens RegexBuddy to edit the regex you have on the Action panel in PowerGREP, now shows the new icon for RegexBuddy 5. The actual integration is fully compatible with RegexBuddy 4 and 5.
The converter for Excel spreadsheets have been updated to fix some bugs that caused the converter to crash on a small number of .xlsx files. By default, PowerGREP remembers if it could not convert certain files and won’t try to convert those files again unless they have been changed on disk. This way PowerGREP doesn’t waste time trying to repeatedly convert files that it can’t, whether that is due to a bug in PowerGREP’s converter or a corrupt file. If you previously got errors when trying to search through Excel spreadsheets then after installing 5.4.0, go into the Cache section in the Preferences and clear the cache to make PowerGREP forget that it could not convert certain files in the past.
The list of steps in the Sequence panel allows you to change the width of its columns by dragging the gap between the column headers with the mouse. These widths are now preserved when you close and restart PowerGREP.
AceText 4.4.0 is now available for download.
This release adds new settings to the Preferences dialog. There is a whole new Syntax page. There you can associate each of the syntax coloring schemes that is available to AceText with one or more file masks. The Clip|Create Clip from Text File command uses these file masks to automatically assign a syntax coloring scheme to each clip it adds based on the name of the file that the clip’s text was loaded from. If you drag-and-drop a file from another application onto the clip tree in AceText then the file’s contents are added as a new clip. Such a clip too is now automatically assigned a syntax coloring scheme based on the file’s name. You should review the file masks. AceText comes with several sets of syntax coloring schemes that use the same file masks by default. For example, there are separate schemes for various SQL dialects. Even Visual Basic now has two schemes. The new one allows line breaks in strings like Visual Basic 14 (Visual Studio 2015) and later do. You should pick a preferred scheme and remove the file masks from the other to stop it from being assigned automatically. You can still manually assign schemes without file masks to clips and you can still select those schemes as defaults on the Applications and Windows pages in the Preferences.
The buttons for downloading syntax coloring schemes and spell check dictionaries and the buttons for customizing palettes were moved from the Appearance page to the new Syntax page in the Preferences.
If you use both AceText 4 and RegexBuddy 5 and you’ve customized the Regex and/or Use palettes in RegexBuddy 5 then you can now import those as Search and Editor palettes into AceText 4.4.0 after exporting them in RegexBuddy 5. RegexBuddy 5 can also import Search and Editor palettes exported by any AceText 4.x.x release as Regex and Use palettes. AceText is now also correctly imports palettes that it exported itself. Previously, trying to import a palette would add a palette with all colors set to “default“. The RegexBuddy icon on the Search toolbar in AceText now shows the new icon for RegexBuddy 5. The actual integration is fully compatible with RegexBuddy 4 and 5.
The Files page adds a third option to the ClipHistory group. In addition to completely purging the ClipHistory when closing AceText and to save the full ClipHistory, you can now choose to purge clips from the ClipHistory after a certain number of days. Previously, this option existed only for the Recycle Bin. When you select this option, AceText still saves the full ClipHistory at regular intervals and when you shut it down. But when you restart AceText it purges clips that have become stale. The option to purge clips after a certain number of days is independent of the limit for the maximum number of clips in the ClipHistory that you can set on the Operation page. That limit is enforced each time AceText automatically captures something into the ClipHistory. That limit cannot be disabled, but you can set it as high as 100,000 clips since AceText 4.3.1.
On the Hotkeys page you can enable the AcePure hotkey. When you press this hotkey, AceText removes all formats except plain text from the Windows clipboard. This hotkey now performs that task if you press it while AceText has keyboard focus instead of showing a message saying that it is intended to be used when another application has keyboard focus.
Pressing Ctrl+A when the list of clips or clip tree has keyboard focus selects all the clips in the collection. New is that Ctrl+A now deselects all clips if you press it when all clips are already selected. This makes it much easier to undo an accidental Ctrl+A.
RegexMagic 2.13.4 is now available for download.
RegexMagic now officially supports Boost 1.89, Java 24, and Delphi 13. These regex flavors are unchanged compared with previous versions.
To add a literal regular expression or replacement text to your source code, you typically need to format it as a literal string, which usually requires quotation characters and possibly other characters to be doubled or escaped. RegexMagic knows the rules for literal strings or literal regular expressions for all the programming languages that it supports. It uses them when adding your regex to a source code snippet on the Use panel. It also lets you convert your regex and replacement into a literal string via the Copy button on toolbar on the Regex panel. It has a drop-down menu that list all the available string styles.
For this release we’ve thoroughly retested RegexMagic’s code for converting regular expressions and replacements into source code strings. We fixed an issue with formatting a replacement text that ends with a single quote as a Groovy string. We fixed another issue with formatting a replacement text text that contains backslashes as a Tcl string.
HelpScribble 8.3.4 is now available for download.
HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor now supports Delphi 13 Florence and C++Builder 13 Florence. HelpScribble’s installer will automatically install it into both the 32-bit IDE and the 64-bit IDE if it detects that you have Delphi 13 Florence or C++Builder 13 Florence installed. HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor can assign HelpContext properties to controls in VCL applications and Multi-Device applications.
With the Import Help Project command you can import old WinHelp projects from a pair of HPJ and RTF files. WinHelp requires topic properties such as the context string (topic identifier), titles, and keywords to be stored in footnotes. HelpScribble’s importer had a bug that caused it to ignore footnotes that consist of a single letter. Because of this, topics with single-letter context strings were not imported at all. Topics with single-letter titles or keywords were imported without their title or keyword. Single-letter context strings are extremely rare. The WinHelp decompiler assigns an 8-character context string to each topic. So if you imported a decompiled HLP file then you did not lose any topics due to this bug.