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RegexBuddy 5.0.5 is now available for download.
This release fixes several more issues that we missed in earlier 5.0.x releases. Opening a file on the Test panel no longer triggers a harmless access violation error if there is no (valid) regular expression to test with. The Print button on the Create panel once again works correctly. The List All Matches of Group menu items under the List All button on the Test panel once again list the matches of the group that you actually selected.
We’ve also started testing RegexBuddy 5 on Wine, which allows Linux users to run Windows applications. While we do not officially support Wine, we try to make our products work on Wine as well as we can. Previous 5.0.x releases crashed on Wine at startup if fonts like Segoe UI that are standard on Windows 7 and later are not available. RegexBuddy 5.0.5 starts correctly if either Segoe UI or Tahoma is available. If not then you get an error message saying you need one of those fonts instead of the access violation error. A basic install of Ubuntu and the bundled version of Wine provides a version of Tahoma that allows RegexBuddy 5 to run correctly. Help|Support and Feedback now indicates the version of Wine that is running RegexBuddy in addition to the Windows version that Wine is pretending to be. We have tested RegexBuddy 5.0.5 with Wine 9.0 on Ubuntu 24.4.
This release also brings improvements to RegexBuddy’s ability to accurately emulate the syntax and behavior of all the applications it supports.
Perl does not allow lookbehind that may need to look back more than 255 characters. PCRE does not allow this if the lookbehind contains a quantifier that has different upper and lower bounds. RegexBuddy now imposes the same limitations if you select Perl or PCRE or an application based on PCRE as your target application.
RegexBuddy is now aware that the Unicode property White_Space has a second short alias space in addition to the already supported short alias WSpace. Unless the regex flavor supports \p{Space} as a POSIX class, RegexBuddy now interprets \p{space} as the Unicode property. This allows RegexBuddy to correctly emulate that all flavors that support \p{WSpace} also support \p{space} instead of saying that they don’t support the POSIX classes with the \p syntax.
If you convert a regex that has both start/end-of-string and start/end-of-line anchors to a flavor such as JavaScript that only supports the anchors ^ and $ but that does provide a mode modifier to toggle these between matching or not matching at line breaks then the converted regex now uses these mode modifiers so that all anchors can be converted correctly.
Some regex flavors support \K to keep the text matched by the regex so far out of the overall regex match. It allows you to write before\Kmatch instead of using the lookbehind (?<=before)match when the before part uses features that the regex flavor does not allow inside lookbehind.
If \K itself is used inside lookaround then complications can arise. Recent versions of Perl and PCRE2 sidestep these issues by making \K a syntax error inside lookaround. RegexBuddy now does so too for these versions of Perl and PCRE2 and other flavors based on these versions of PCRE2.
Inside a lookbehind it could cause the regex match to begin at a position before the start of the match attempt. Inside lookahead it could cause the regex match to begin at a position after the end of the match, resulting in a backwards match. This can cause errors when retrieving the match, which it does in PHP, for example. If the regex consists entirely of a lookahead containing \K then that results in a non-zero-length match that does not advance through the string. This can result in an infinite loop, which it does in Perl and R. RegexBuddy’s own regex engine implements \K in the same way as Perl, including the infinite loops and errors. But emulating these problems, while accurate, is not useful. RegexBuddy still allows \K inside lookaround it if the application you’re targeting allows it. But to prevent infinite loops and crashes, if the regex ends up finding a match that begins before the start of the match attempt or beings after the end of the match then RegexBuddy aborts the matching process with an error explaining why it did so and why your regex may cause problems in your actual application.
RegexBuddy is now also aware of whether the application supports or ignores \K if it is encountered during a subroutine call or recursion of the entire regex.
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.