Dear subscribers of this newsletter, Notepad2 4.2.25-rc1 is now available. There's a new command to align lines (Alt+J), either left, right, centered or block justified, taking into account indenting whitespace. Block justification has a paragraph mode, causing lines followed by a blank line and a text length of less than 80% of the block width to be left aligned, forming a visual closure to the paragraph. The modify lines (Alt+M) dialog supports several variables to insert continuous numbers, either zero-based, one-based, or based on the document line numbers, with or without padding zeros. The sort lines dialog (Alt+O) has a new option to shuffle lines. Files can now be recoded in UTF-16 Little Endian and UTF-16 Big Endian formats, for cases where Unicode detection is inappropriate. The new hotkey Ctrl+Shift+F recodes the current file in the default encoding set by the user. Analogous to "Tab key reformats indentation", there's a "Backspace reformats indentation" option (Ctrl+T) to control the behaviour of the backspace key inside indenting whitespace (delete or unindent). The update to Scintilla 2.24 introduces some improvements to the search functionality: Notepad2 now finally supports case insensitive searching for non-ASCII characters! The built-in regular expression engine has a new ? operator, acting as a 0-or-1-times quantifier, or a non-greedy modifier to the * and + quantifiers. For example, <.+> matches all HTML tags on a line, whereas <.+?> matches only one tag. The syntax for regular expression tagged regions has been simplified from \(...\) to (...), called POSIX compatible mode in Scintilla. As a consequence, bare ( and ) need to be matched using \( and \) in regular expression mode. Some find and replace hotkeys (F3, Shift+F3, Alt+F3 and F4) also work inside the find and replace dialog boxes. And, it's no longer possible to suppress the text not found message. Additional Emacs file variables allow control over word wrap (truncate-lines), tab key behaviour (c-tab-always-indent), and file variable parsing itself (enable-local-variables). The statement "enable-local-variables=false" within the 512 head or tail bytes of a file will shut down file variable parsing. If the default font has been set to "Consolas", there's a fallback to "Lucida Console" on systems where "Consolas" is not installed. This improves settings portability between Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows. The new /l and /l- command line switches can be used to enable or disable auto-reloading of files modified by external programs. A timeout before auto-reloading files prevents potential read/write locks (can be configured in the Notepad2 ini-file). Handling of pathnames on the command line is now more flexible and also accepts forward slashes as pathname separators. Everything following the + or - switches is now considered a pathname, thus allowing pathnames with / and - as their first character: notepad2.exe - /dir/file Furthermore, there's various smaller changes to syntax schemes and keywords, the Notepad .LOG feature has been fixed, Notepad2 no longer locks any directories except the one where Notepad2.exe resides, and filename extensions are always displayed, regardless of the Windows Explorer settings. Ctrl+Shift+P copies the current window position as a Notepad2.exe command line option to clipboard. The unnecessary notification messages after importing and exporting style settings have been removed, but an adequate error message pops up if there's a failure when exporting styles. The toolbar buttons should look better on Windows 2000, and the appearance of the disabled toolbar buttons has been modernized on Windows XP and newer versions of Windows (can be manually reset through an ini-file option). The official release of Notepad2.exe is now available as a 64-bit build (AMD64 or x86-64 processor architecture, x64 for short). The 64-bit target machine of the executable file is indicated in the Notepad2.exe file properties (right-click in Windows Explorer, and choose Properties). Last but not least, Notepad2 has a tiny setup tool to replace Windows Notepad with Notepad2 [1], based on the setup program created by Kai Liu [2]. Complete uninstallation is possible through Windows Control Panel. [1] http://www.flos-freeware.ch/doc/notepad2-Replacement.html [2] http://code.kliu.org/misc/notepad2/ The 64-bit portability warnings have been eliminated from the source code, and the build scripts have been simplified with a makefile. Notepad2 4.2.25-rc1 is based on Scintilla 2.24. The source code of the setup tool will be published with the final release of Notepad2 4.2.25. Download from the Notepad2 website: http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html There's also new 64-bit build of metapath, the Explorer-like add-on for Notepad2. http://www.flos-freeware.ch/archive.html Best wishes, --flo