PowerGREP 5.3.8 is now available for download.
In the File Selector and Results menus there are submenus for copying, moving, and deleting files and folders that are selected or that were involved in the most recently executed action. They show a dialog box that lets you specify where you want to copy or move the files to or that asks to confirm that you really want to delete the file. When you click the Copy, Move, or Delete button on the dialog it now shows a progress meter while the files are being copied, moved, or deleted along with an Abort button that lets you stop the operation. Previously, PowerGREP would appear unresponsive if copying, moving, or deleting the files took a long time. Aborting the operation does not undo what has already been done. Copy and Move operations are added to the Undo History where they can be undone if no files were overwritten or if you enabled backup copies in the dialog box.
In the folders and files tree on the File Selector panel you can mark the Clipboard and/or Editor nodes with the green tick mark to include them in your action. This makes your PowerGREP Action search through or otherwise process the contents of the Windows clipboard and/or the contents of the Editor panel in PowerGREP. Now you can explicitly exclude the clipboard and editor from your action by marking these nodes with the red X. In previous versions of PowerGREP marking them with the red X caused the action to fail. Not marking the nodes at all still excludes them from the action, as it correctly did in previous versions too.
If you mark the Editor node with the green tick and set the search type on the Action panel to binary data then the Editor panel now automatically switches to hexadecimal mode when you execute the action if the Editor panel has a file open that uses an encoding that may use more than one byte per character. That includes all Unicode encodings and all “double byte” Windows code pages. This ensures that the action can correctly search for the binary data on the Editor panel. Previous versions of PowerGREP did not switch the Editor panel to hexadecimal mode when they needed to search it using binary data, causing the action to fail.
PowerGREP’s installer has long supported the /silent command line parameter to automate the installation. Previously, this would install PowerGREP for the current user if the installer was run without administrator rights, or for all users if it was run with administrator rights. Now, the licensed installer (but not the free trial installer) allows you to add the /portable parameter to create a portable installation instead. You can specify the installation folder after /portable separated with a space. Put double quotes around the path to the installation folder if it contains spaces. So SetupPowerGREP.exe /silent /portable D:\PowerGREP creates a portable installation into D:\PowerGREP without any prompts or any progress indicators.
EditPad Pro 8.5.4 is now available for download.
The tool configuration lets you restrict tools to certain file types. This can make the Tools menu easier to use if you have a lot of tools. It also allows you to add identical tools for different file types. You could have a “Compile” tool for both Java and C++, for example, with one only visible for Java files and the other only visible for C++ files. When you use this feature, the tool configuration dialog now grays out tools that will not be visible in the menu for the active file. When the tool configuration dialog first appears, it now preselects the tool you most recently ran or the tool you most recently edited instead of preselecting the first tool. If there is no previous tool or if the previous tool is grayed out then the dialog now preselects the first tool that is not grayed out. Combined, these small improvements make the tool configuration dialog easier to work with when you have many tools with similar or identical names for different file types.
When an error occurs on the FTP panel, EditPad Pro displays the error message it receives from the FTP server. But FTP servers don’t always include important details such as the file name in their error messages. Now, EditPad Pro adds the file name to the error message if the FTP server didn’t already do so. This is particularly helpful when opening or saving many files at the same time on the same server.
If enable the option to save the workspace in the Save Files Preferences then EditPad Pro automatically reloads the files you had open during your previous session when it starts. It could happen that the File Navigator appeared blank upon startup even if the file that was activated by loading the workspace uses a file navigation scheme. This was a timing issue that depended on the size of the file and the complexity of the scheme. Switching to another file and back always fixed it. Now EditPad Pro makes sure the File Navigator is shows the file navigation tree for the active file upon startup. If the file is very large then it may take a moment for the tree to appear as it is built in the background.
On the Open Files page in the Preferences you can configure EditPad Pro to treat files larger than a certain size as huge files. EditPad Pro always keeps a lock on such files to be able to swap them out to disk. There is also an option to keep a lock on all open files, regardless of their size. Previously, the File|Reload on Disk menu item was disabled when EditPad has a lock on the active file. Now, File|Reload on Disk menu item is only disabled when the locked file does not have any unsaved changes in EditPad. When EditPad has a lock on a file it cannot be modified by another application, so there is no point in reloading it if it does not have any unsaved changes. When the file does have unsaved changes, reloading it can be a quick way to undo all those changes.
EditPad’s installer has long supported the /silent command line parameter to automate the installation. Previously, this would install EditPad for the current user if the installer was run without administrator rights, or for all users if it was run with administrator rights. Now, the licensed installer (but not the free trial installer) allows you to add the /portable parameter to create a portable installation instead. You can specify the installation folder after /portable separated with a space. Put double quotes around the path to the installation folder if it contains spaces. So SetupEditPadPro.exe /silent /portable D:\EditPadPro creates a portable installation into D:\EditPadPro without any prompts or any progress indicators.
EditPad Pro 8.0.0 was a major release that brought many new features. This release improves some of those and fixes some issues with a few others.
EditPad Pro 8.0.0 added the ability to automatically reformat files with line breaks and indentation if they do not have any line breaks at all when you open them. By default it can do this for XML, JSON, and CSS files. This makes it much more comfortable to inspect or edit such files that are written by automated tools that don’t care to make their files human-readable. Now, this feature ignores trailing line breaks when checking if the file already has trailing line breaks. So it will prompt to reformat an XML file, for example, that was written with everything on a single line and a line break at the end. If you choose to have the file reformatted then the trailing line breaks are stripped first. Reformatting may or many not add a new trailing line break, depending on the scheme and the file’s contents.
In EditPad Pro 8.0.0, Go|Sort File Tabs Alphanumerically and Go|Sort Project Tabs Alphanumerically replaced Go|Sort File Tabs Alphabetically and Go|Sort Project Tabs Alphabetically. On the Files Panel, the Alphanumerically option replaced the Alphabetically option under the Sort button. These put “Chapter2.txt” before “Chapter10.txt” and “Book2.epp” before “Book10.epp” because 2 is less than 10. Alphabetic sort did it the other way around because 1 appears before 2. When EditPad Pro receives files from the command line or via drag-and-drop it now opens them in alphanumeric order as well. Previously it opened them in alphabetic order. Project|Open Folder and Project|Import File Listing now open files in alphanumeric rather than alphabetic order as well.
The Go|Go to Position command replaced the Go to Line command in EditPad 8.0.0, allowing you to move the cursor to a specific column, among other options. Previously, this moved the cursor one position further to the right than the column that you specified unless you enabled the option to use zero-based line and column numbers. This has been fixed. The Go to Position command now works correctly with zero-based and the default one-based column numbers.
Since EditPad 8.0.0, when you customize the palette you can apply a strikeout to certain colors. The predefined palettes apply this to the “redacted” color. This color is used by the Markdown syntax coloring schemes for ~~redacted~~ text, for example. The strikeout can use one of various styles, such as “thick” or “double“. But if it was set to a style other than “font” then previous 8.x.x releases failed to display the strikeout when using a complex script text layout which is needed to work with scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew or the various Indic scripts. The text still appeared by the strikeout did not. This has been fixed.
File paths that are longer than 260 characters may need to be prefixed with \\?\ or \\?\UNC\ before they are passed to the Windows API if Windows is not configured to support long paths. EditPad 8 does this automatically, enabling full support for long paths. Applications are not supposed to add this prefix to paths shown to the user. EditPad never did this and EditPad itself does not need the prefix. But, previously, EditPad did not check whether paths it receives from other applications via the command line or from the shell via the File|Open dialog had this prefix. This did not cause any problems because EditPad does understand the prefix. But EditPad would then show the path in the status bar or the tab’s tooltip, which is inappropriate. Now, EditPad strips the prefix from paths that it receives, so you see only the actual path even if another application passed it with the prefix.
EditPad Lite 8.5.4 is now available for download.
On the Open Files page in the Preferences you can configure EditPad to keep a lock on files that you have open in EditPad. Previously, this disabled the File|Reload on Disk menu item. Now, this disables the File|Reload on Disk menu item only when the file does not have any unsaved changes in EditPad. When EditPad has a lock on a file it cannot be modified by another application, so there is no point in reloading it if it does not have any unsaved changes. When the file does have unsaved changes, reloading it can be a quick way to undo all those changes.
EditPad’s installer has long supported the /silent command line parameter to automate the installation. Previously, this would install EditPad for the current user if the installer was run without administrator rights, or for all users if it was run with administrator rights. Now, the installer allows you to add the /portable parameter to create a portable installation instead. You can specify the installation folder after /portable separated with a space. Put double quotes around the path to the installation folder if it contains spaces. So SetupEditPadLite.exe /silent /portable D:\EditPadLite creates a portable installation into D:\EditPad without any prompts or any progress indicators.
EditPad Lite 8.0.0 was a major release that brought many new features. This release fixes a few issues with some of those.
In EditPad 8.0.0, Go|Sort File Tabs Alphanumerically replaced Go|Sort File Tabs Alphabetically. This puts “Chapter2.txt” before “Chapter10.txt” because 2 is less than 10. Alphabetic sort did it the other way around because 1 appears before 2. When EditPad receives files from the command line or via drag-and-drop it now opens them in alphanumeric order as well. Previously it opened them in alphabetic order.
The Go|Go to Position command replaced the Go to Line command in EditPad 8.0.0, allowing you to move the cursor to a specific column, among other options. Previously, this moved the cursor one position further to the right than the column that you specified. This has been fixed.
Since EditPad 8.0.0, when you customize the palette you can apply a strikeout to certain colors. The predefined palettes apply this to the “redacted” color. This color is used by the Markdown syntax coloring schemes for ~~redacted~~ text, for example. The strikeout can use one of various styles, such as “thick” or “double“. But if it was set to a style other than “font” then previous 8.x.x releases failed to display the strikeout when using a complex script text layout which is needed to work with scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew or the various Indic scripts. The text still appeared by the strikeout did not. This has been fixed.
File paths that are longer than 260 characters may need to be prefixed with \\?\ or \\?\UNC\ before they are passed to the Windows API if Windows is not configured to support long paths. EditPad 8 does this automatically, enabling full support for long paths. Applications are not supposed to add this prefix to paths shown to the user. EditPad never did this and EditPad itself does not need the prefix. But, previously, EditPad did not check whether paths it receives from other applications via the command line or from the shell via the File|Open dialog had this prefix. This did not cause any problems because EditPad does understand the prefix. But EditPad would then show the path in the status bar or the tab’s tooltip, which is inappropriate. Now, EditPad strips the prefix from paths that it receives, so you see only the actual path even if another application passed it with the prefix.
RegexBuddy 4.14.3 is now available for download.
RegexBuddy now officially supports .NET 9.0, Boost 1.88, and Java 23, and Ruby 3.4. These regex flavors are unchanged compared with previous versions.
On the Test panel, the List All menu has an option to show non-participating groups. This makes test results that show the matches of capturing groups show n/a for a group that did not participate in the regex match instead of showing nothing for such groups. Unfortunately, enabling this option also showed n/a for groups that did participate but captured nothing, defeating the purpose of this option. This has been fixed. The Test panel now always shows nothing for groups that captured a zero-length match. So by turning on this option you can distinguish between groups that didn’t participate (indicated as n/a) and groups that did participate but captured a zero-length match (showing nothing as the match)..
This release improves the usability of drop-down lists on toolbars, such as the one to select the application you’re working with in the top left corner of RegexBuddy’s window. Rotating the mouse wheel now scrolls the drop-down list when the mouse pointer is hovering over an expanded drop-down list that has a scroll bar. With the drop-down list expanded you can now select an item by entering the first few letters of the item you want to select. If the list has the items PCRE, Perl, and PHP, for example, then you can enter PH to select PHP. If you make a mistake then you can press Backspace to go back one letter at a time. Or you can wait for one second after the last key press to start over.
RegexMagic 2.13.3 is now available for download.
RegexMagic now officially supports .NET 9, Boost 1.88, Java 23, and Ruby 3.4. These regex flavors are unchanged compared with previous versions.
This release improves the usability of drop-down lists on toolbars, such as the one to select the application you’re working with on the toolbar of the Regex panel. Rotating the mouse wheel now scrolls the drop-down list when the mouse pointer is hovering over an expanded drop-down list that has a scroll bar. With the drop-down list expanded you can now select an item by entering the first few letters of the item you want to select. If the list has the items PCRE, Perl, and PHP, for example, then you can enter PH to select PHP. If you make a mistake then you can press Backspace to go back one letter at a time. Or you can wait for one second after the last key press to start over.
DeployMaster 7.5.1 is now available for download. This release fixes two bugs.
One bug was introduced with DeployMaster 7.5.0. If you had previously saved a .deploy file that used the option to completely cover the screen background on the Appearance page then the background preview would appear in front of DeployMaster if you opened that .deploy file by double-clicking it on Windows Explorer. The problem did not occur if you started DeployMaster using its desktop icon and then clicked the Open button to open the file. The correct behavior, which has now been restored, is for DeployMaster to start with the Project page active and no background preview when you double-click a .deploy file in Windows Explorer. The background preview appears behind DeployMaster only while the Appearance page is active.
The other bug is more serious and dates back to DeployMaster 4.0.0. We discovered it after further testing of the new /portable command line parameter that is newly supported in installers built with DeployMaster 7.5.0 to force a portable installation in combination with the existing /silent parameter to fully automate the installation. The issue occurs if the readme file, license agreement, or support DLLs specified on the Project page or the background bitmap specified on the Appearance page are also added as files to be installed on the Files page. You may want to do this with the readme file and license agreement, for example, so the user can refer to these documents again after installation. When passing /silent /portable to an installer built with DeployMaster 7.5.0 it would pop up errors that these files could not be installed. This led us to discover that passing only /silent to an installer built with any version of DeployMaster also fails to install those files, but doing so silently. These files are handled differently because the installer needs to extract them before the actual installation starts so it can display them as part of the installation prompts. These files are reused rather than extracted again when they need to be installed. But silent installations do not initially extract these files, making them unavailable for reuse during the actual installation.
This bug has now been fixed. Silent installations now properly install all files, including the files used on the Project and Appearance pages. If your installer uses files on the Project or Appearance pages that you also added to the Files page, and your users may want to run your installer with the /silent parameter, then you should rebuild your installer with DeployMaster 7.5.1 to make sure these files are installed.
AceText 4.3.2 is now available for download.
AceText 4.3.1 added a new setting to the Operation preferences labeled “do not automatically capture text when the clipboard has no owner“. The option was on by default.
Normally, the Windows clipboard is “owned” by a window that is part of the application that most recently copied text to the clipboard. AceText can identify which application the window is part of. You can configure clipboard owners in the Applications and Windows Preferences in AceText to selectively prevent or allow the ClipHistory to automatically capture the text they copy.
But some applications do not retain ownership of the clipboard. They use a temporary window handle to access the clipboard and destroy that handle immediately after the text was copied. This prevents AceText from identifying the application that copied the text. The desktop application for the BitWarden password manager, for example, behaves this way. We added the option “do not automatically capture text when the clipboard has no owner” and enabled it by default so that AceText would not automatically capture text copied by BitWarden.
Since the release of AceText 4.3.1 we’ve received quite a number of reports from users that this version stopped capturing text copied by specific applications. It turns out that there are plenty of other applications out there that copy text without retaining clipboard ownership. Therefore, the option “do not automatically capture text when the clipboard has no owner” is now off by default for new installations of AceText 4.3.2. If you previously installed 4.3.1 then you can turn off the setting yourself on the Operations page in the Preferences.
AceText 4.0.0 added a new clip kind called “text with emphasis“. It allows you to apply some limited text formatting such as bold, italics, underline, and strikeout and a number of color highlights to your text. AceText 4.3.2 fixes a few bugs in this area. Deleting all the contents of a “text with emphasis” clip (without deleting the clip itself) now works correctly. Previously, trying to use the “text with emphasis” clip kind triggered errors if the clip did not use the “parameters” option and live spelling was turned off in the Options menu and URL highlighting was turned off in the Preferences. If one of these was turned on then the errors did not occur. URL highlighting is on by default. Live spelling is on by default if you’ve installed one or more spell check dictionaries.
AceText’s installer has long supported the /silent command line parameter to automate the installation. Previously, this would install AceText for the current user if the installer was run without administrator rights, or for all users if it was run with administrator rights. Now, the licensed installer (but not the free trial installer) allows you to add the /portable parameter to create a portable installation instead. You can specify the installation folder after /portable separated with a space. Put double quotes around the path to the installation folder if it contains spaces. So SetupAceText.exe /silent /portable D:\AceText creates a portable installation into D:\AceText without any prompts or any progress indicators.
HelpScribble 8.3.3 is now available for download.
HelpScribble’s HelpContext property editor now supports the 64-bit version of the IDE that is new in Delphi 12.3 Athens and C++Builder 12.3 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.
Windows 10 and 11 do not support the legacy WinHelp format, but HelpScribble still does. You can still compile WinHelp files with HelpScribble even when HelpScribble is running on Windows 10 or 11. When you do so, HelpScribble shows a message explaining that you need Windows 8.1 or prior to view the WinHelp file you just created. This dialog box has been updated with a link to HelpScribble’s own website to download the WinHelp viewer for Windows Vista, 7, 8, or 8.1. Microsoft has removed the WinHelp viewers for Windows Vista and 7 from their own website. So as a service to our users who may still need to support legacy systems we’re now making these downloads available from our own server. Windows XP and prior have the WinHelp viewer built-in.
When you use HelpTools|Internet Link in HelpScribble to add a link to a web page HelpScribble inserts an ExecFile() WinHelp macro with the URL. When compiling into HTML Help (CHM) format, HelpScribble converted these macros into regular links. Those links would open the web page inside the HTML Help viewer. This was originally a major feature of the HTML Help system. It allowed seamless integration between help file content stored on the local computer and additional content stored on a server. Even though Internet Explorer has been discontinued, the HTML Help system internally is still based on the old IE code. A major issue with this is that it simply doesn’t support modern JavaScript. The HTML Help viewer will pop up an error message when it can’t execute some JavaScript. This happens even with web pages that use minimal amounts of JavaScript, such as HelpScribble’s own website.
To better deal with this reality, HelpScribble now converts ExecFile() macros that open an URL into links that open the page in a new browser window when compiling into CHM format. This will be whichever browser is the default browser on the user’s system.