Messages

26

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Select Copy - Auto-copy selected text

« on: June 16, 2015, 06:58 PM »

Haha, I wonder what could possibly have triggered that. It doesn't even save a preference file, let alone touch the registry or anything.

There's an embedded ScintillaNET DLL in the main exe - maybe that hit a raw nerve in it

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: WildGem 1.1

« on: June 16, 2015, 06:22 PM »

In the meantime, you can drag the vertical center bar to have it cover 90% of the screen space.

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: WildGem 1.1

« on: June 16, 2015, 06:05 PM »

@hamradio: Oh, I read your initial post again. Properly this time. I see what you want - for the Find section to cover the whole width (and to hide the entire Replace section).

That's... interesting. I like it. I'll put that on the todo list instead.

@dr_andus: Good to hear!

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: WildGem 1.1

« on: June 16, 2015, 05:51 PM »

I'm sure you know, but just in case - you can write in the regex section and completely ignore the 'WildGem syntax' Find section if you wish. But yeah, good to save space if possible.

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: WildGem 1.1

« on: June 16, 2015, 05:42 PM »

Idea: What about a way to disable/hide replace and size the find and the textarea accordingly if all you want to do is build regex in your program for use elsewhere?

Nooooo, the special non-regex syntax is the best bit!   Seriously, would you personally find that useful? If so, I'll put it on the todo list!

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: WildGem 1.1

« on: June 16, 2015, 04:28 PM »

Thankies!  

Some errr, creative uses of the program I see too  

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Select Copy - Auto-copy selected text

« on: June 16, 2015, 01:19 PM »

Yeah, I expect a warning for the type of functionality this sort of program offers. But it's bad of Chrome to block it outright (and not even use the word 'possibly' as a prefix for malicious) without me being able to override its block. Maybe there's a way to make it 'appear' more safe to paranoid browsers like Chrome.

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Select Copy - Auto-copy selected text

« on: June 15, 2015, 05:01 PM »

I think I might find this useful. I often dislike having to Ctrl+C before I can Ctrl+V.

One thing you might have some info on though, Chrome complains when I try to download it: "select_copy.zip is malicious, and Chrome has blocked it.".

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / WildGem 1.1

« on: June 15, 2015, 01:34 PM »

I originally posted an idea for a new "find and replace" program here. A couple of people liked the idea, so I developed it into a real application.

It takes the good bits from Regex, but makes the syntax simpler in a few ways. The program is great for people who don't want to get into Regex, but who find the usual find/replace feature in many text editors too limiting. More information on its advantages can be found in the link below, or in that thread from earlier.

For those who missed it, or who want a faster, non-glitchy, updated version of that beta edition, download the latest version 1.1 here:

http://www.skytopia.com/software/wildgem (requires .NET 4)

Here's some screenshots:

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General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: June 10, 2015, 08:08 AM »

Ace, let me know if there's something I should really add.

36

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: June 09, 2015, 05:18 PM »

Thanks for the feedback! The non-beta version will be potentially hundreds of times faster (helpful for 100MB or even 1GB+ files!), and will allow the escape syntax in the replacement section too.

The speed increase is due to the Scintilla text component (the one Notepad++ uses!) - so much better than .NET's crappy RichTextBox. Oh HOW I wish I knew about that when I was developing OpalCalc...

37

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: June 07, 2015, 01:17 PM »

I must say, I still don't get it.  Those symbols are not regular symbols that one would use on the keyboard, so what is it for?  Is it just a regex builder in the end?

Thanks for the question! I included the special symbols for a few reasons:

1: Each special WildGem symbol can represent two, three or even 10+ regex symbols. I don't want to use the original symbols, as they already have meaning. Something like "the ✪ quick" is nicer than "the .*? quick" ;P

2: They are easier to distinguish with the eye than the standard regex symbols, as they don't look like 'normal text'. Less escapes makes the expression clearer even further. This helps especially for more complicated expressions.

3: You can paste text directly directly into the Find expression without having to worry about escaping any of the characters in said text. The WildGem symbols I use are very rare, and hardly anyone would otherwise use them in day to day work.

Anyway, even if you never use the special symbols, and only use the regex filter, I hope you'll find it's a pretty nifty util anyway. Apart from regexr.com, I don't think anything else has quite this layout where everything is accessible, updates on the fly, and that highlight all regex matches at once in the main text. Be interested to see others programs that can do that if you can find one.

@Ath: Width now reduced to a more compact 1013 pixels instead of 1185 !

38

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: June 07, 2015, 10:52 AM »

Thanks and glad your initial impression was favourable!

Resizing the window isn't very polished

It was either that, or no resizing. A workaround may be tricky. I mean, I could put it into a scrollable pane I guess...

The window is quite big, it may not fit correctly on smaller screen resolutions (and then the first item comes in)

The width is 1185 pixels. I doubt many are using less than around 1300 pixels of width these days. Still, if someone on this forum is, I'll eat my hat, and try and condense it.

Tooltip time is rather short at it's default setting

Ah, the developers of .NET would like to talk to you. Anyway, yes I agree entirely, and a (somewhat tricky) fix is forthcoming. In the mean time however, all the info from the tooltips are available in the main help section.

You might want to add the regex code inserted by a button into the tooltip, for the more technical/interested users

Not a bad idea - I'll consider it.

39

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: June 07, 2015, 08:50 AM »

Well, I've got a beta, but stable and fairly polished feature-packed version complete. Love to hear some feedback from pro regex users and people who don't have a clue about how regex works. Even if you're not interested in the unique "unicode symbol" way of doing things, it's a pretty nice regex editor anyway.

Here's a couple of screenshots:





I now know more than I ever expected to know about Regex. Unlike most other find/replacers and regex helpers, "WildGem" (as it is now called) puts the focus on the text you're trying to search in (and the text you're trying to replace). In the end, I kept most of the core functionality that regex provides, but the most common uses are kept at the forefront (e.g: the simple symbol ✪ is the equivalent of ".*?" in regex language and there's a single simple symbol for the messy regex "(?:^|$|\n|\r\n)" which can find the start or end of any line).

And here it is - a single self-contained 53kb exe. No installation necessary, though it does require .NET 3.5 or later: http://www.skytopia....om/stuff/WildGem.exe

40

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: May 26, 2015, 11:24 AM »

Especially if it interfaces with/generates RegEx.

You bet! I've added an option so that it not just displays the Regex on the fly, but you can edit the Regex if you need more power than WildOpal would usually provide.

A nice feature is even editing the text to work on - it will highlight letters as you go along. So everything updates on the fly automatically whether you're typing in the search (regex, or WildOpal style), replacement text, or the main text that it searches on.

If it did, it could get some use especially if it could be invoked easily through e.g. Notepad++

Well, for now, it's easy enough to select text and copy paste it straight into WildOpal, but yes that's worth considering.

rather than trying to re-invent a wheel that isn't a wheel and getting your head wrapped into a pretzel on meta design issues!

Yes that road is littered with headaches, mines and nightmares. Implementing even a few basic features was proving to be more than a little tricky. Piggybacking off Regex is a breeze in comparison!

Anyway, it's coming along pretty well so far. Here are the buttons/symbols I've implemented so far and what they convert to:

• Single character: .
• Many characters: .+?
• Repeat character: +
• Numeric digit: \d
• Numeric digits: \d+?
• Newline: (\r\n|\r|\n)
• Newlines: (\r\n|\r|\n)+?
• Symbols: [^\s\w]+?
• Symbol: [^\s\w]
• Letters: [a-zA-Z]+?
• Letter: [a-zA-Z]
• Charset: []
• Charset (repetitions):[]+?
• Single whitespace char: \s
• Multiple whitespace chars: \s+?

If any of you can think of other very common Regex snippets (excluding ones using {}<>#| as I've yet to implement those), let me know.

41

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: May 25, 2015, 05:09 AM »

wraith808: Shame it isn't fully standard in the spec, but crumbs, you're right - the \Q...\E does indeed work to treat chars as literal, at least in Notepad++. Asking at SuperUser.com produced no response, and it was missing from practically all of the tutorials I saw from searching with Google, so I assumed it was impossible.

It's going to be a lot easier to create this hypothetical program than I anticipated, since I thought of the (now obvious) idea to use Regex as a middleman. My program simply becomes a sugary wrapper for Regex. Things like ".+?" (without the quotes) can be replaced by that inverted star wildcard symbol for example. Other things like the newline symbol can represent "\r", "\r\n", or "\n" (with the option to use those specifically for more power if need be), and "[0-9]+" or "\d+" can be replaced with a single symbol.

I know they're little things, but it all helps, and can potentially reduce a complex expression to at least half its original size. Like a sugar-coated Regex.

You're proposing not just a software tool, but a standard to be used in searching

Yes, I think it would be neat to see something like this used everywhere, especially for people who don't use Regex very frequently, but obviously the chance of that is virtually zero. Maybe some people may find it useful though, so I'll persevere regardless.

42

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:21 PM »

Thanks everyone for all for the feedback.

Regex has this big problem in that you can't allow a section of text to be treated as 'non-special'. I had some text I wanted to operate on that lots of symbols. Unfortunately, it would have meant I had to escape each and every one - not my idea of fun, especially since special symbols apparently differ according to the Regex implementation.

I know Regex has got a lot of momentum now, but I can't help feeling there are fundamental advantages to this kind of approach offered by WildOpal (as well as possible small disadvantages I admit, such as extra developer effort). For beginners, or the non-techy minded at least, it should be an improvement I think, but even seasoned users should find an improvement in theory, at least in certain ways.

For example, it's clearer for somebody else who didn't create the original expression to read it more easily.

43

General Software Discussion / Re: WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: May 24, 2015, 03:17 PM »

MilesAhead: Yes, the "Group" button to allow pseudo-'variables' in the 'Replace' section should handle that in my hypothetical program.

44

General Software Discussion / WildOpal - hypothetical new idea for a "find and replace" program

« on: May 24, 2015, 11:38 AM »

I wanted to do a simple 'find and replace' in Notepad++, and found out that it can only support simple WYSIWYG queries or over-complicated Regex statements which can sometimes feel like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. After some frustration going down that road, I decided to think about how a "find and replace" feature should work, at least for 99% of purposes. I wanted something elegant and simple, yet clear and relatively powerful. I wanted NOT to worry about escaping special characters, yet I didn't want to lose the power that would usually provide or the efficiency of using the keyboard.

Colour coding, multiple lines, dual/split display, and on-the-fly updating come as standard (as per my other program Opalcalc ;).

This is what I've come up with so far. It's not a working program yet. I wanted to see if there was much interest in developing this further, and maybe even there's something already out there similar as I'm not overly keen on reinventing the wheel.



The unique unicode-flavoured characters offer numerous advantages over typical Regex/Extended syntax queries which rely on existing symbols:

1: It's clearer to formulate expressions and see what you're searching for, and whether certain characters are supposed to be 'special' or 'not'.

2: It's clearer for someone who has to read the expression and who had no idea what you were trying to do.

3: No worry about having to escape characters which may otherwise interpret normal text as 'special' commands. In comparison, with Regex, you may need worry about escaping more than ten different symbols over a text file!

4: Expressions can be reused for different texts without worrying about escaping anything in those texts.

5: Each symbol is easier to commit to memory, so the learning curve is greatly shortened.

Function keys are used for the special characters, so no speed is lost if you're only typing.

I've been pretty frustrated with how cumbersome and arcane the syntax can appear when formulating Regex queries. I hope many of you appreciate the advantages such an approach would provide. By all means, I'd be interested to hear any tweaks or additions to the general concept if you can think of anything! What kind of programs come closest?

45

General Software Discussion / Re: Program to override usual window close button with superfast TerminateProcess?

« on: April 29, 2015, 02:08 AM »

SuperF4 looks good. I've used it, and it does indeed force close crashed programs!

A couple of niggles though. One is I can't adjust the hotkey. Two is if a program's crashed, and I click another program, and then I try to refocus the crashed window, it won't refocus, and SuperF4 ends up trying to close Windows or something else instead.

Anyway, a keeper for me Thanks muchly anandcoral!

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« on: April 06, 2015, 07:32 AM »

$US100
US$100
$US 100
US$ 100
US $100
USD 100
100 USD
USD $100
$100 USD

Wow talk about standardization. Just one more reason why I'd love to see a universal currency - then we could stick with '$' for everything! I think for now I might just cater for XYZ 100 (so I'd be supporting four methods of writing it in total).

It's the same with time too of course. If we all switched to UTC (or as a first step, just had 24 time zones and scrapped DST), we'd be laughing. Here's a very funny video which accurately portrays the nightmares involved when working with time: https://www.youtube..../watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« on: April 05, 2015, 09:39 AM »

Hmmm.. is putting USD before the number very common in the US or other countries?

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« on: April 05, 2015, 05:11 AM »

Yes, the "USD" bit should always go after the number. The exception is the $ symbol which can before or after.

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« on: April 04, 2015, 05:57 AM »

Oh I see! I should probably try the minimalist mode myself.

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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: OpalCalc 1.43

« on: April 03, 2015, 01:29 PM »

Simple click the main brown/red square dropdown, and then "check for update". That should send you to the full version page.