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.
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.
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.