Regex Hero Blog

Yesterday I found a couple bugs. Tabbing or untabbing multiple lines of text would occasionally fail. The size of the tab itself was inconsistent inside the textbox. This seems to be a glitch in the RichTextBox itself. I solved both bugs yesterday and it's working fine now. Then today I created a little promotional video for Regex Hero Professional . It's definitely of a different style than the other videos I've made. It's a little light on dialog and a little heavy on demonstration. Also I've included a couple clips from royalty-free songs I purchased from SoundSnap.com today. Let me know what you think.

There's been a bug in Regex Hero (and in Silverlight) ever since it launched. It's something I've tried to fix on many occasions but was always left in tears. The problem lies with scrollable textboxes. You see, Regex Hero doesn't word wrap. If it did, the instant highlighting would be much, much slower. So if you're pasting a huge block of text that is over 25,000 pixels wide into the textbox, of course you'll be doing a lot of scrolling. The bug was a strange one. After a certain limit the text would essentially go blank as you're scrolling. This was incredibly annoying. Finally, Microsoft released the RichTextBox control in Silverlight 4. It's a much more powerful control, and best of all, it doesn't have this bug! I've spent the last 3 weeks implementing changes to make the RichTextBox work within Regex Hero... In making this change I've also solved a problem with my multiple undo/redo system. That's simply because ...

Yes, I have finally taken the plunge. My stats show the adoption rate for Silverlight 4 has reached 78%, which is pretty close to my target. The immediate improvements you'll notice are right-click context menus for the textboxes... As well as support for mouse wheel scrolling. These are both small, simple, but much needed features. I'm still working on improving real-time highlighting. And I'm still on my quest to figure out word wrapping. Meanwhile, I also have some ideas on how I can further improve the benchmarking feature. Look for another release coming next week.

I blogged awhile back about the Silverlight 4 adoption rate on the Regex Hero site . Naturally the figures on the site are a little higher than the worldwide averages. But at this point Silverlight 4 has overtaken Silverlight 3 by a healthy margin. In fact Silverlight 4 is at a 75% overall adoption rate as collected by my Google Analytics profile this past week... My plan was to launch a new version of Regex Hero after Silverlight 4 surpasses the 80% mark. And things are looking good. In my own testing with Silverlight 4 the instant improvement was the function of the mouse wheel. I didn't have to change a thing to make this happen. After I set Regex Hero to target Silverlight 4 all the textboxes were scrollable with the mouse wheel. I'm also working on the right-click context menus for cut/copy/paste, and undo/redo. If all goes well I'll release a new version next week with these improvements. Meanwhile I'm also working on incorporating the more powerful...

I've been lacking a good way for you guys to try Regex Hero Pro before you buy, until now. The new trial lasts 7 days and allows you to experience everything Regex Hero Pro has to offer, including code hinting. To start the trial all you have to do is create a login . Or if you already have a login, then the trial will automatically start the next time you visit Regex Hero .

I was planning this one for awhile. I just needed to set aside some hours to build it. Code hinting has been available for regular expressions for a couple months. But now all pro users will see code hinting for the replace box as well... You can see the named groups ${LastName} and ${FirstName} at the top of the list. My hope is that this will promote the use of named groups in regular expressions, rather than numbered groups. I think named groups have a way of better expressing the intention of the regular expression and to be able to select them from a list is pretty awesome. Enjoy.

I discovered yesterday that in some cases the wrong text is selected when you're stepping through the matches with the Previous/Next buttons. Specifically it would happen when you're working with multiple lines of text and "CrLf marks a line ending" is checked. I just now fixed the problem so it won't happen again.