[flos-freeware] Notepad2 4.2.25-rc1

  • From: Florian Balmer <florian.balmer@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: flos-freeware@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 22:16:27 +0100

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

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