Don’t let the long lists of issues on this page make you think our products have a lot of problems. Quite to the contrary. All the bugs listed below are bugs that we have fixed. Many of these are corner cases reported by only one or perhaps a handful of our customers. Other software companies often don’t spend any effort addressing such issues, much less list them publicly. We take pride in producing high quality software, and often release free updates to ensure you won’t have any problems with our software.
Your purchase also comes with one year of free major upgrades. So don’t worry if there might be a new major upgrade around the corner just because it’s been a while since the last major upgrade. If there is one around the corner, you’ll get it free, without having to ask. (But you can keep the old version if you prefer.)
If you ever hit a snag with EditPad Pro, check here whether you have the latest version. If you do, simply report the issue on the forum and we’ll help you out as soon as we can.
You can use Block|Rectangular Selections to switch between making normal and rectangular selections. All of EditPad’s commands that operate on a selection also work with rectangular selections. This release brings a few fixes so that Block|Move Selection and Block|Swap Selections work correctly with rectangular selections too.
Before you can swap selections you need to use View|Split Editor to get two views of the same file. You can make a different selection in each view. Splitting the view affects all open files. The view remains split in the same way when you switch between files. This release fixes a bug that caused EditPad to crash if you split between a file that was using a left-to-right text layout and another that was using a right-to-left text layout, or vice versa. A right-to-left text layout allows for more natural editing of files written primarily in a right-to-left language such as Hebrew or Arabic.
Some mice have a wheel that can be tilted left and right. EditPad’s editor control is now able to receive mouse wheel tilt messages. It will scroll the text horizontally when you tilt the wheel if word wrap is off and there are lines longer than the width of the editor.
Modern trackpads allow you to slide two fingers over the trackpad to perform a scrolling gesture. Technically, this gesture makes the trackpad send mouse wheel messages. You could previously scroll vertically this way in EditPad because EditPad’s editor control has long recognized mouse wheel rotation messages. Because it now also recognizes mouse wheel tilt messages, you can now scroll horizontally in EditPad by sliding two fingers horizontally over a trackpad.
On the Definition page of the file type configuration dialog there is a checkbox labeled “show in file type selection lists“. It controls whether the file type is shown in the drop-down list with file types on file selection dialog boxes such as those shown by File|Open and File|Save As. By default this is checked for all file types. You can clear it for file types that you don’t use (often) to make it easier to pick the file types that you do use often. Now this checkbox is disabled for the “unspecified file type“. Many of EditPad’s features assumes that this file type is at the top of the list. It is used as a fallback when no other file type has a file mask or regex that matches a particular file. It allows file selection dialogs to show all files as its file mask is *.*.
The color palette which you can customize for each file type has separate entries for “character” and “character string” in the list of individual colors. Most of the predefined palettes give the same color to both, such as blue in the default palette and yellow in the “white on black” palette. But some, such as the Visual Studio palettes, give them different colors. Many of the syntax coloring schemes included with EditPad can use the two different colors to highlight character escapes within strings. The included PHP schemes do this. But they didn’t take into account that PHP has different rules for single-quoted and double-quoted strings. In a single-quoted string, a backslash can only escape itself and a single quote. EditPad now includes updated PHP schemes that implement this correctly.
EditPad Pro includes several file navigation schemes for Markdown. There are different schemes for different Markdown dialects. For each dialect there is a scheme that makes EditPad Pro’s File Navigator show a flat list of headings and another that makes it show a nested tree of headings. The schemes can also add folding ranges to your file so you can fold the text of a section under its heading. The schemes that produce a flat list only fold the text that follows the heading, stopping at the next heading. The schemes that produce a tree have been changed to extend folding ranges until the next heading that is at a higher level. So if you fold a heading then all the text following that heading and any sub-headings is folded under that heading. This makes the behavior of the automatic folding ranges consistent with the file navigation tree for Markdown files.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.5.3 version history
EditPad’s windows always have standard title bars and window borders. So Windows itself determines their color and appearance. You have some control over this in the personalization settings in Windows. If you are running Windows 11 then EditPad now requests dark title bars and window borders when you use EditPad’s dark theme. This provides a more harmonious look. Windows 10 and prior do not support this.
The Copy as HTML and Copy as RTF menu items in the Edit menu are toggles that tell EditPad to make any text you copy available on the clipboard in HTML and/or RTF format. This allows you to paste text with syntax coloring in web editors or word processors or any application that can paste HTML or RTF. Any method of copying text, including pressing Ctrl+C, will copy HTML and/or RTF as long as these menu items remain active. You need to use the Copy as HTML and Copy as RTF menu items again to turn them off. If both are off then EditPad copies only plain text.
If you turn off “copy active line when nothing is selected” on the Editor page in the Preferences then all the Copy items in the Edit menu are grayed out when nothing is selected. Previously, the Copy as HTML and Copy as RTF items would also fail to show their checkbox when nothing is selected, giving the impression that these options were off. Now, these items show their checkbox even when they are grayed out to make it clear that next time you select some text and copy it then it will be copied as HTML and/or RTF.
In EditPad 8.5.0 and 8.5.1 the toolbar buttons and menu items for the Undo and Redo commands worked on the active editor control, which could be the Search or Replace box. This was contrary to the documentation and the actual behavior in all previous releases EditPad Pro. The previous behavior has been restored. The Undo and Redo menu items and toolbar buttons always work on the file you’re editing.
The reason for the change in EditPad 8.5.0 was an incorrect bug fix. In EditPad 8.0.0 to 8.4.2 the keyboard shortcuts for the Undo and Redo commands (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y by default) worked on the file you’re editing when the small Search or Replace box had keyboard focus. The keyboard shortcuts are supposed to work on the editor that has keyboard focus. This works with the multi-line Search and Replace boxes in all versions of EditPad Pro. It worked with the single-line Search and Replace boxes in EditPad 7 but was broken in EditPad 8.0.0. This was (improperly) fixed in 8.5.0. Now a proper fix has been applied so that the keyboard shortcuts for Undo and Redo work on the editor with keyboard focus, while the toolbar buttons and menu items work in the file you’re editing.
The Search|Multi-Line Search Panel command lets you switch between using EditPad’s full search panel with multi-line Search and Replace boxes and using just the Search toolbar with small Search and Replace boxes that only allow a single-line search term. When you switch from the multi-line panel to the single-line toolbar, EditPad 8 retains only the first line of the search term. But in EditPad 8.4.2 and prior it actually continued to use the previous multi-line search term until you made a change to the search term. EditPad 8.5.0 fixed this so that the single-line search term being displayed in the small Search box is the actual search term being used.
But it is possible to disable the Search toolbar by right-clicking any toolbar and selecting Search. When you do this, closing the multi-line search panel does not switch to the single-line toolbar. So then there is no reason to reduce the search term to just a single line. EditPad 8.5.0 and 8.5.1 did this. EditPad 8.5.2 restores the previous behavior of keeping the multi-line search term when closing the search panel entirely. You can continue to search using the previously entered search term using the items in the Search menu or their keyboard shortcuts.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.5.2 version history
Version 8.5.0 updated the connectivity that underpins EditPad Pro’s FTP panel. This was necessary to support additional SFTP encryption algorithms and protocols to enable connections with SFTP servers that only allow a limited set of modern algorithms and protocols. Unfortunately, the updated library had a bug in its TLS encryption handler which made it impossible to download files from FTP servers using TLS encryption. So we have now reverted to an earlier version of the FTP library which does not have the TLS bug but still includes the additional SFTP encryption support needed to connect with a private key to a server running a default configuration of Ubuntu 22.04. We also fixed an older bug that prevented the Connect to FTP dialog from showing previously imported private keys when using the dialog for the first time since starting EditPad Pro.
First-time installations of EditPad Pro now include predefined file types for TypeScript and F# source code with syntax coloring. The TypeScript file type also has a file navigation scheme. If you upgrade from a previous 8.x.x release then the syntax coloring and file navigation schemes will be installed but the file types will not be added automatically. You can download a configuration file with the new file types or the one for the dark theme and import it via Options|Configure File Types to add the F#, Markdown, TypeScript, and YAML file types that were added or modified in EditPad Pro 8.5.0 and 8.5.1.
The C# syntax coloring scheme and the JavaScript syntax coloring and file navigation schemes have been updated to support the latest features of these programming languages.
EditPad lets you type letters with various diacritics by first typing a punctuation character while holding down Ctrl and then typing the letter (without holding down Ctrl). Ctrl+@ T now types the ™ symbol and Ctrl+& supports additional ligatures. Ctrl+/ or Ctrl+: followed by a digit type additional vulgar fractions. Ctrl+. is a new combination that lets you type various letters with dot above as well as dotless ı and ȷ. Most of these new characters are only available if your file’s encoding is Unicode.
EditPad Pro now includes a syntax coloring and file navigation schemes for GitHub Flavored Markdown. These support GitHub’s extensions to the syntax, including fenced code blocks and strikeout. GitHub’s flavor allows most syntax to be nested inside other syntax, such as headings inside list items. The existing Markdown schemes are now more clearly labeled as supporting the original syntax from Daring Fireball. They have been adjusted to more accurately reflect limitations and quirks of the original Markdown.pl, such as not allowing headers inside list items. First-time installations use the GitHub schemes by default for the Markdown file type. Upgrading from a previous 8.x.x release will install the new schemes but will not change your Markdown file type. If you want to use the new GFM schemes then you can select them in the file type configuration.
The Delphi, Java, R, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Transact-SQL syntax coloring and file navigation schemes have all been updated to (better) support the latest versions of these languages. There are also new regular and “fast” syntax coloring schemes for GoogleSQL which is the syntax used by BigQuery. You can select these for the SQL file type in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax.
First-time installations of EditPad now include a predefined file type for YAML data files with syntax coloring. If you upgrade from a previous 8.x.x release then the YAML syntax coloring scheme will be installed but the YAML file type will not be added automatically. You can add your own file type and select the YAML syntax coloring scheme in Options|Configure File Types.
The spell checker now only checks words that consist entirely of characters that occur in the dictionary. If a word contains a character that is not in the dictionary then it’s assumed to be in a different language.
When downloading syntax coloring scheme or spell check dictionaries EditPad now uses HTTP instead of HTTPS to connect to our server if you are running Windows 8.1 or earlier. This prevents connection issues if your Windows installation wasn’t updated to support TLS 1.2. Our server no longer supports TLS 1.1 or prior.
EditPad Pro now supports additional SFTP encryption algorithms and protocols. This allows EditPad’s FTP panel to establish connections with SFTP servers that only allow a limited set of modern algorithms and protocols. Connecting with a private key to a server running a default configuration of Ubuntu 22.04 now works, for example, while it previously said “authentication failed publickey“.
If your file is predominantly written in a right-to-left language such as Arabic or Hebrew then you can switch EditPad to a right-to-left text layout. This aligns the text to the right hand side and moves the vertical scrollbar to the left hand side. This left hand vertical scrollbar is now positioned and displayed correctly when using the dark theme that was added in EditPad 8.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.5.0 version history
The editor’s performance while scrolling the text has been improved. You’ll particularly notice this if you have a mouse with a stepless scroll wheel. The editor will now keep up with the wheel no matter how fast you rotate it.
Several fixes were made to the Extra|Compare Files feature. Lines highlighted as added or removed now use the text color specified in the palette instead of the plain text color when the file doesn’t have a syntax coloring scheme. The dialog for selecting the file to compare with now automatically widens the Full Path column in the list of files when you widen the dialog and no longer allows you to make the dialog so small that there is no space for the comparison options. If the only difference between the two files is that blank lines were added or removed then option to “ignore added and removed lines” now triggers the message “The files are identical, except perhaps for differences you have selected to ignore” instead of displaying a comparison with no actual differences. Comparing two files with “ignore added and removed lines” turned off and then comparing them again with the option turned off now removes the file comparison marks from blank lines in the original files when highlighting changes in the original files. Loading a file was saved with comparison info and then edited or truncated outside EditPad Pro to make the comparison info incomplete is now loaded without the comparison info instead of failing with an access violation error.
Various minor bugs and issues have been fixed. Edit|Copy as HTML or RTF no longer adds double line breaks to the HTML or RTF when you copy CRLF line breaks from a file using one of the JSON syntax coloring schemes. Search|Find on Disk now correctly opens or adds files in which only zero-length regular expression matches can be found. Edit|Delete Line now properly deletes the last line in the file when the cursor is after the last line break in the file. When customizing the palette in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax, the color pickers are now restricted to solarized, harmonized, or monochrome colors when editing such palettes. The Editor: Control Characters color is now applied to control characters that are visualized as IBM PC glyphs or Unicode control pictures when using a complex script text layout (just like it already was when using a left-to-right text layout). Help|Create Portable Installation now copies over the lists with learned words and learned replacements for each selected spell checker dictionary.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.4.2 version history
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.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.4.1 version history
EditPad Pro’s built-in FTP support has received a significant overhaul. The main goal was to remove the dependency on OpenSSL. These DLLs are no longer included with EditPad Pro 8.4.0. The installer will remove them from EditPad Pro’s installation folder if you upgrade from a previous 8.x.x release to 8.4.0. Our main motivation for removing OpenSSL is that some companies have policies against these DLLs because of security concerns or open source policies. EditPad Pro 7 and previous 8.x.x releases do work correctly if you delete these DLLs, but then lose SSL and TLS support.
In the Connect To FTP dialog, you can now select the IP version. Selecting “IPv4” gives you the behavior of previous EditPad versions which only supported IPv4. The new default is “auto” which lets you connect to both IPv4 and IPv6 servers. You can also select “IPv6” to use IPv6 with host names that have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.
In the Connect To FTP dialog, the “TLS, if available” encryption option has been removed. This was a useful option at a time when most FTP servers did not support TLS. With this option you could use TLS if the server happened to support it, but otherwise just fall back to plain FTP. If TLS support was added to the server later, EditPad would automatically start using it. Now that TLS support is far more common, it’s better to select one of the “Explicit TLS” options if you know the server supports TLS. This way you won’t unknowingly end up with an unencrypted connection if TLS support is later disabled on the server, either by a bumbling administrator or an attacker.
The “SSL” encryption options have been renamed to “Implicit TLS“. Their functionality is unchanged. Even in EditPad 8.3.x the “SSL” option could use TLS 1.0, 1.1, or 1.2. The only difference between implicit TLS and explicit TLS is the way the connection to the server is established. Explicit TLS is most common these days. What is now called “implicit TLS” was used during the days of SSL, before TLS existed. Hence the labeling in previous versions of EditPad.
The “SSH” encryption option has been removed. What this did was to create an encrypted tunnel to the server via SSH and then make a plain FTP connection through the tunnel. This too was useful at a time when most FTP servers did not support TLS. If a server supported SSH (but not SFTP) and FTP (but not TLS) this combination still allowed encrypted file transfers. Now you’ll need to either select SFTP (SSH’s file transfer method) or one of the TLS options.
TLS 1.3 is now supported. TLS 1.2, 1.1, 1.0, and SSL 3.0 are still supported. Support for SSL 2.0, which was deprecated in 2011, has been removed.
The same changes have been made to the encryption options for SMTP connections in Options|Preferences|Email. SMTP via TLS too no longer depends on the OpenSSL DLLs.
The POP-before-SMTP option was removed from Options|Preferences|Email. Once upon a time, when SMTP servers did not support authentication, some email providers required people to check their email (via POP) before they could send email. These days, most SMTP servers require direct authentication.
FTP and SFTP (SSH) connections can now go through a proxy server. HTTP, SOCKSv4, and SOCKSv5 protocols are supported. The Connect to FTP dialog has a button for configuring the proxy. The proxy settings apply to all FTP and SFTP connections. The FTP proxy settings are separate from the proxy settings for HTTP connections that EditPad uses for things like downloading spell check dictionaries or custom schemes in the file type configuration.
You can now select a different font face and font size for the main menu. The same font is also used by drop-down menus, context menus and toolbar buttons that have text labels such as the search options. To change the font, right-click the main menu or any toolbar and select Menu Font in the context menu.
You can select a different font face and font size for the status bar by clicking the new button in Options|Preferences|Status Bar. The status bar will automatically adjust its height and the width of its indicators to the size of your chosen font.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.4.0 version history
The Search|Find Previous command now works when using a regular expression if you enable the “line by line” search option. Normally Find Previous is disabled when using a regex because regular expressions cannot search backwards. But in line by line mode EditPad can iterate over the lines in your file from bottom to top and apply the regex from left to right on each line to find the previous line in which the regex can find a match.
This release also fixes two bugs we introduced in version 8.3.0. Search|Fold Lines failed with an access violation instead of removing the folding when you tried to turn it off. Fold|Remove All Folds could still be used to remove the folding. Search|Replace Current, Replace and Find Next, and Replace and Find Previous failed with an access violation error if the replacement text contained the %LINE% or %LINEN% match placeholders.
Several older bugs were also fixed. The version history has the complete list. One serious issue was that if a file type's default encoding was UTF-16 or UTF-32 and you opened a file of that type that was not a multiple of 2 or 4 bytes in size (as it should be for UTF-16 or UTF-32) then previous versions of EditPad trimmed the final bytes in the file to make it a multiple of 2 or 4 bytes in size. The file was then either left with the UTF-16 or UTF-32 encoding or it was interpreted using the non-Unicode encoding specified in the file type configuration depending on how many invalid code points it contained if interpreted as UTF-16 or UTF-32. Now, EditPad always uses the non-Unicode encoding to interpret the file if the file does not have a BOM (Unicode signature) and the default encoding is UTF-16 or UTF-32 but the file is not a multiple of 2 or 4 bytes, without trimming any bytes from the file.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.3.1 version history
The Block|Move Lines & Columns submenu has commands for moving lines up and down. These can now move lines beyond the top and bottom line of the file, adding blank lines as needed. Moving the penultimate line in a file down no longer adds a line break to the (new) last line of the file if there wasn’t a line break at the end of the (old) last line.
The Mark menu lets you set bookmarks so you can quickly jump back to specific positions in your file. If you choose to preserve cursor positions in the Save Files Preferences then EditPad remembers bookmarks of files that are part of projects and of recently closed files listed in the File|Open submenu. This now works correctly for files opened in hexadecimal mode.
EditPad 8 can highlight the angle brackets of HTML and XML tags and the quotes around attributes when the cursor is inside a tag. This does prevent EditPad 8 from highlighting the matching closing tag when the cursor is inside an opening tag. If you want to restore the EditPad 7 behavior of always highlighting matching opening and closing tags (and never separately highlighting angle brackets or quotes around attributes) then go into the Brackets section of the file type configuration and turn off “highlight brackets within tags“. This option is only enabled if the syntax coloring scheme supports nested brackets like the supplied HTML and XML schemes do. Toggling this option now immediately updates the bracket matching in files that you have open. Previously it would only update after you edited or reloaded the file.
If you fold some lines then the print preview has an option “hide folded lines“. Tick this to print the file in the same way it is displayed. Untick this to print all lines in the file. In previous versions, hiding folded lines could cause the printout to be paginated incorrectly, possibly resulting in pages with only a single line. This has been fixed.
The Project|Open and Project|Favorites submenus now show the same project icons project tabs and the Files Panel. Managed projects get a bluish icon and unmanaged projects a reddish icon.
EditPad Pro 8.2.0 introduced new command line parameters that provide the same functionality as the File|Tail menu item. These parameters were incorrectly applied to all following files opened from the command line without additional parameters. This also affected files opened by double-clicking them in Windows Explorer. This has now been fixed. All command line parameters, including those for tailing files, only affect the files passed on the same command line as the parameters.
Single-line edit controls in EditPad 8 now select all their contents when they receive keyboard focus. They did this in EditPad 7 as well and do in most Windows applications. This notably affects the small Search and Replace boxes when using the Search toolbar without the full Search panel.
The Search|Find Next command finds the next search match after the position of the cursor. When the Selection Only search option is active and you’ve made a new selection then the Find Next command will use the new selection as the search range and select the first match, even if the cursor is at the end of the selection. If there is an existing search range and no selection, then the Find Next command finds the next search match within the search range. If there is no selection and you moved the cursor outside the search range then Find Next finds the first match in the search range. Though it may seem a little complicated, the result is that Find Next works quite naturally when using the Selection Only search option. It allows you to rely solely on the Find Next command when searching through different parts of the file, without having to use the Find First command whenever you make a new selection to search through.
One change made in EditPad 8.3.0 is that when the cursor is at the end of an existing search range and the Loop Automatically option is off then Find Next will not find the first match but indicate that no further matches can be found. Previously it would find the first match again as if the cursor was outside the search range. This makes sure that the Find Next command doesn’t loop when it shouldn’t when searching for a regex that finds a zero-length match at the end of the selection. That can easily happen when using ^ or $ to find the start or end of a line and the search range ends before or after a line break.
You can right-click the Search or Replace box to insert path placeholders or match placeholders. Inserting match placeholders now works correctly with the small Replace box when using the Search toolbar without the full Search panel. Inserting path or match placeholders now keeps the keyboard focus on the small Search and Replace boxes too. Highlighting search matches now works correctly with search terms containing path placeholders too.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.3.0 version history
This release fixes two bugs. One was introduced yesterday in 8.2.5. It caused files to appear to be completely empty if they did not contain any line breaks and you selected a scheme for automatically adding line breaks for that file type in Configure File Types|Colors & Syntax. By default this is the case for the CSS, JSON, and XML file types. EditPad Pro 8.2.5 failed to load such files. The problem did not occur if the file did contain one or more line breaks or you did not have EditPad add line breaks. The problem did not affect the files on disk. Those remained intact.
The other bug was introduced in EditPad Pro 8.2.1. In Configure File Types|Navigation you can choose to add automatic folding points based on a file navigation scheme. We made a performance improvement in 8.2.1 that had an unfortunate side effect. If you had a file open with some or even all folding points folded, you made an edit in that file, waited a moment for the file navigation scheme to start parsing the file again, and made a second edit that changed the number of lines in the file while the file navigation scheme was still busy, then the some of the folded folding points in the file would be shifted to the wrong lines, depending on how far the file navigation scheme had reached through the file. The problem was more likely to occur with larger files as then the file navigation scheme takes longer to parse the file giving you more chance to be unlucky with the timing of your second edit. Version 8.2.6 fixes this issue while keeping the performance improvement.
EditPad Pro now includes syntax coloring and file navigation schemes for JSON with comments and for JSON5 in addition to the original JSON schemes. If your JSON files use one of these variants then you can select the new schemes in the file type configuration. The JSONC and JSON5 syntax coloring schemes come in regular and in “fast” versions. Select the regular (non-fast) syntax coloring scheme in the “syntax coloring scheme” drop-down list and the fast scheme in the “syntax coloring scheme for huge files” drop-down list. The “fast” schemes drop support for multi-line comments and strings to enable them to instantly highlight the visible part of the file. The original JSON scheme comes only in “fast” version because the original JSON syntax can be fully supported by a fast scheme.
In EditPad Pro 8 you can use the File|Tail menu item to load the tail end of a file. Version 8.2.0 added command line parameters to do the same. Now, loading the tail end of a file via the command line places the cursor at the end of the file just like the File|Tail menu item does.
File|Print could fail with an AV or crash EditPad entirely when preparing the print preview for a large file that is showing indentation indicators or has automatic folding points added based on indentation. This has been fixed. Indentation indicators between matching brackets are also printed now.
In the Editor Preferences you can enable an option to make rotating the mouse wheel while holding down the Ctrl key on the keyboard change the font size. This effectively makes Ctrl+Wheel zoom the text in or out. This now works correctly when using a complex script text layout.
When searching and replacing using a regular expression, you can use \U0, \L1, \I2, or \F3 to insert the whole regex match or the match of a capturing group converted to uppercase, lowercase, initial caps, or first cap. These now work correctly regardless of whether any case conversion actually occurs. Previously they would jumble the replacement string when the matched text already had the correct case or if it didn’t have any case. When a regex matched 9, for example, replacing with with \U0; resulted in ;9 instead of 9;.
The Search|Find Last command now pops up a message saying regular expressions cannot search backwards similar to the Search|Find Previous command. In the past the Find Last command would search through the entire file for all regex matches and stop at the last one. But this did not work reliably and could be very slow on large files with many regex matches.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.2.5 version history
This release fixes one bug that we introduced in EditPad Pro 8.2.3 last week. The Search|Replace Current and the Search|Replace & Find Next commands substituted backreferences in the replacement text with nothing instead of substituting them with the capturing group matches of the most recent regular expression match. This bug did not affect the Replace All command.
If you enter a regular expression with a syntax error into the Search box then EditPad highlights the invalid part of the regex in red. If you try to search with it anyway then you get a popup message explaining the error. But a regex that is syntactically valid may still trigger an error while the regex engine tries to execute it due to infinite recursion, catastrophic backtracking, or an excessive number of group repetitions. EditPad now pops up an error message for these execution errors too instead of treating them as failed match attempts. This makes the problem with the regex more obvious.
EditPad Pro’s FTP panel supports SFTP as well as FTP. SFTP, which is part of the SSH protocol, may use a private key rather than a password to secure the connection. In the Connect to FTP dialog you can click the (...) button next to “private key” to import your SSH key. If the key file uses a format or algorithm that EditPad Pro does not support then you now get an error message saying the key could not be imported instead of an access violation error. In particular, EditPad Pro is not yet able to import private keys exported by OpenSSH that use the ECDSA algorithm even though EditPad Pro has supported ECDSA itself since version 8.0.0. If you are able to generate a new private key for your SFTP account then you can switch to the ED25519 algorithm. EditPad Pro can import OpenSSH keys using ED25519. ED25519 is generally considered to be the strongest algorithm supported by OpenSSH at the moment.
You can use the View|Dark Theme menu item to toggle between EditPad’s light and dark themes. Doing so also switches your file types between light and dark color palettes if you selected palettes that have a light or dark companion palette. Two issues were fixed in this area. The Search and Replace boxes now immediately use the new palette if the file type of the active file has a light or dark companion palette. Companion palettes that you select for custom palettes are now preserved correctly when you restart EditPad.
EditPad 8.2.0 through 8.2.2 maintained the right-click menu of EditPad’s taskbar button by themselves when running on Windows 7 or later. Windows calls this menu the JumpList. This was done to implement a feature request to allow this right-click menu to be used to switch between files that are already open in EditPad. But this caused various problems. The JumpList failed to retain pinned items. EditPad 8.2.0 and 8.2.1 failed to start when the JumpList could not be initialized which happened when using WINE to run EditPad on Linux. As the problems outweighed the benefits, EditPad 8.2.3 lets Windows maintain its JumpList just like EditPad 8.1.2 and all prior versions used to do.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.2.3 version history
This release fixes some issues that we missed in 8.2.0 and 8.2.1.
Starting with version 8.2.0, EditPad maintains the right-click menu of its button on the taskbar by itself when running on Windows 7 or later. Windows calls this menu the JumpList. EditPad 8.2.0 and 8.2.1 failed to start when the JumpList could not be initialized. This happened when using WINE to run EditPad on Linux.
In EditPad 8.2.0 we improved the syntax coloring for Python files to handle integers that use underscores to group digits. Doing so we broke the highlighting of integer numbers containing zeros and of all hexadecimal numbers. This has been fixed.
In the settings in Windows you can configure the mouse pointer to snap to the default button when an application shows a dialog box. This was broken in EditPad 8.2.0. Now EditPad respects this option again.
EditPad 8 has a dark theme that you can activate via Options|Dark Theme. On the Panels page in the Preferences you can configure the colors of the side panels. EditPad 8.2.0 did not correctly apply the side panel colors when using the dark theme. This has been fixed.
When using the multi-line Search panel, the Edit|Delete Line command deletes a line in the Search or Replace box when it has keyboard focus. When using the single-line Search toolbar, the Edit|Delete Line command now deletes the search term or replacement when the Search or Replace box has keyboard focus instead of deleting a line in the file you’re editing.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.2.2 version history
EditPad Pro 8.2.0 crashed at startup with an access violation error if the Macros menu held a macro that runs a tool. This has been fixed.
On the Search page in the Preferences there are options for instantly highlighting and instantly replacing all occurrences of a word by double-clicking it. These are enabled by default so people can easily discover these abilities. But this can also cause confusion if EditPad suddenly starts highlighting a word and people don’t realize they double-clicked it. Therefore EditPad Pro now shows a message explaining these features the first time you activate instant highlight or instant replace by double-clicking. You’ll only see the message once per EditPad Pro session. The message has a checkbox to permanently disable it.
EditPad 8.2.0 was the first release to be fully compatible with the new AceText 4. A new feature in AceText 4 is that each clip can have its own syntax coloring scheme and an associated URL. To support this, when EditPad 8.2.0 and later make text you copy available on the clipboard in the format that AceText uses to copy clips. This allows AceText to capture or paste the name of the file you’re editing as the clip’s URL and also the syntax coloring scheme you’re using In EditPad. AceText 4 can use all syntax coloring schemes designed for EditPad 8. But this caused some issues in version 8.2.0 as it would paste the AceText clip that it copied rather than its own clipboard format. An obvious consequence was that the option “paste whole lines when lines are copied as a whole” on the Editor page in the Preferences appeared non-functional. EditPad 8.2.1 still makes the AceText clip format available on the clipboard. But it now gives priority to pasting EditPad’s own clipboard format copying and pasting within EditPad works like it did in 8.1.2 and prior.
In EditPad 8.2.0 we made various performance improvements to EditPad’s syntax coloring system. Unfortunately we also introduced a few bugs. Those have now been fixed. The built-in “clickable URLs” scheme did not correctly update itself while typing. No syntax coloring appeared at all if live spelling was enabled but you didn’t have any spell check dictionaries installed.
We have also updated the Custom Syntax Coloring Scheme Editor to incorporate all the improvements to the syntax coloring system. There is no change to the syntax coloring scheme file format. All EditPad 8.x.x releases can use the same .jgcscs files.
The Search and Replace boxes can apply syntax coloring to regular expressions. Both the single-line and multi-line boxes now do this consistently using the palette of the active file type.
In EditPad 8.2.0 we introduced new options for the behavior of the Home and End keys. Unfortunately this caused the End key to misbehave or do nothing at all if you enabled “allow text cursor to be moved beyond the end of the line” and pressed the End key with the cursor placed beyond the end of a line. This has been fixed. Pressing the End key while the cursor is at the end of the line now moves the cursor in the same way as when you press the End key with the cursor in the middle of the line.
The Tabbing page in the file type configuration now correctly registers changes you make to the quote character and escape character for tab-separated values.
Starting with version 8.2.0, EditPad maintains the right-click menu of its button on the taskbar by itself when running on Windows 7 or later. Windows calls this menu the JumpList. EditPad 8.2.0 could sometimes pop up errors about the JumpList. EditPad 8.2.1 will silently stop updating the JumpList if there are any problems with it.
Various other minor fixes and improvements were also made. The version history has the complete list.
A month ago we released AceText 4 which is a major upgrade for that product. When you use EditPad and AceText together the Clip Collection panel in EditPad shows the contents of the collection that is active in AceText. If you upgrade to AceText 4.0.x and to EditPad 8.2.0 then EditPad will make use of the new capabilities in AceText 4. A big improvement is that the integration between EditPad and AceText now works with portable installations too. If the ClipHistory tab is active in AceText and you copy text in EditPad that is captured by the ClipHistory then the Clip Collection panel in EditPad now immediately shows the newly captured clip. EditPad now makes text you copy available on the clipboard in the format that AceText uses to copy clips. This allows AceText to capture or paste the name of the file you’re editing as the clip’s URL and also the syntax coloring scheme you’re using In EditPad. AceText 4 can use all syntax coloring schemes designed for EditPad 8. All schemes included with EditPad 8 are also included with AceText 4. If you use custom syntax coloring schemes, you need to install them for both EditPad and AceText.
If you upgrade to EditPad 8.2.0 but continue using AceText 3 or prior then the integration between EditPad and AceText will continue to work like it did in previous versions of EditPad. Just like the integration between AceText and EditPad continued to work if you upgraded to AceText 4 while still using EditPad 8.1.2 (or any prior version that has the Clip Collection feature). When you use AceText and EditPad together it is AceText that opens and saves your .atc files.
If you use EditPad without AceText then EditPad manages its Clip Collection feature on its own. A few of the new features in AceText 4 are available in EditPad 8.2.0 even if you don’t use AceText. The Edit Clip dialog now lets you select any syntax coloring scheme available to EditPad. It also lets you specify an URL which can be a website or the full path to a file on your computer or Windows network. EditPad 8.2.0 can also open clip collections (*.atc files) saved by AceText 4. A consequence of these new abilities is that EditPad 8.2.0 saves clip collections in version 4 of the .atc file format. Previous versions of EditPad cannot open collections saved with EditPad 8.2.0. You should back up your .atc files if you use EditPad’s Clip Collection feature without AceText before upgrading to 8.2.0.
EditPad Pro 8 has 6 automatic editing features: automatic case conversion, automatic quote conversion (smart quotes), automatic indentation (increasing or decreasing indentation, not just maintaining it), automatic line breaks, automatic bracket matching and automatic trimming of trailing whitespace. Exactly which of these edits are appropriate and how they should be made greatly depends on the type of file you’re working with. They can all be configured for each file type. The Text Document file type, for example, automatically converts all straight quotes into smart quotes like a word processor does. This is appropriate for letters and reports that the Text Document file type is intended for. But it would break most source code. EditPad knows this. Its syntax coloring system can specify which quotes may be converted. The HTML schemes, for example, allow straight quotes to be converted into smart quotes in the body text of the file. But they don’t allow quotes around HTML attributes to be changed. All other file types have automatic quote conversion disabled by default. To get the full benefit of these editing features you need to select the correct file type when you start with a new file. You can do this with the File|New submenu. EditPad Pro now shows an information message the first time it applies each of these automatic edits during an EditPad session. The message tells you how you can toggle the feature for the active file and how you can set the default. It also reminds you to select the correct file type. You only get one message for each of the 6 edits per EditPad session even if you don’t tick the “don’t show this again” checkbox. If you do tick it then you’ll never get the message about that particular edit again.
The File|Tail menu item is new in EditPad Pro 8. It lets you load only the tail end of a file and/or continuously reload the file. These features are now available on the command line too. Use /tailsize followed by a number to load only that number of megabytes from the end of the file. Use /tailinterval followed by a number to reload the file at an interval of that number of seconds. Use /tailappend to tell EditPad Pro that if the file grows it is only ever appended to and optimize reloading the file accordingly. If you pass multiple files on the command line then these parameters apply to all the files on the command line.
A tool that you add to the Tools menu in EditPad Pro can be restricted to specific file types. You can have multiple tools with the same name for different file types. You could have multiple tools named “Compile“, for example, that run the appropriate compiler for the kind of source code file you’re editing. You can record the running of a tool as part of a macro. But previous versions of EditPad Pro did not take the file type restrictions into account when running a tool during macro playback. This could cause the macro to run the wrong “Compile” tool, for example. Now EditPad Pro does take this into account. The macro will run the tool that is appropriate for the file type of the active file. This may be a different tool than when the macro was recorded if the active file during playback is of a different type than during recording. Macros reference tools by their caption. If the tool does not exist or is not available for the active file type then macro playback stops.
EditPad 8 introduced a new feature called elastic tab stops. You can enable these on the Tabbing page in the file type configuration. The key benefit of elastic tab stops is that you can perfectly line up text into columns using a single tab, even when using a proportionally spaced font. When others edit your files your tabs will line up perfectly for them too regardless of which settings they are using in their editor, as long as it supports elastic tab stops too. This release fixes a few issues that caused elastic tab stops to sometimes stop working. It also fixes an issue that caused tab stops not to be elastic when starting with a blank file using a file type with elastic tab stops enabled. Indentation indicators (which you can toggle with the Options|Visualize Indentation menu item) now work correctly when elastic tab stops make indentation tabs wider than the tab size (to line them up with an adjacent line that has tabs but is not indented).
Elastic tab stops align the tabs on lines that have the same number of tabs. This allows you to line up columns independently in separate parts of the file. But EditPad 8 can also make tab stops elastic throughout the file. You can enable this with the tab-separated values option on the Tabbing page in the file type configuration. If you open a TSV file then its columns will line up perfectly throughout the file in EditPad, regardless of how large the file is. New in version 8.2.0 is that you can specify a comment character. Lines starting with this character and that do not contain any tabs do not affect the width of the first column in the file. If you specify a value separator character (such as a comma for CSV files) then the value separator is ignored on lines starting with the comment character.
The syntax coloring schemes for Batch files, C#, JavaScript, PowerShell, and Python have been improved.
The Cursors page in the Preferences now has additional options for the Home and End keys. Previously, the Home and End keys would only move to the start and end of wrapped lines when word wrap is on. Now you can make them go to the start of the physical line too. If you turn on “physical line” and turn off “wrapped line” then the Home and End keys ignore word wrapping. If you turn on both then they first move to the start/end of the wrapped line. A second press moves to the start/end of the physical line. The options to make the Home and End keys move the cursor next to the first/last non-whitespace character on the line now have an additional option to do this on the second press of the key. The first press then moves to the very start/end of the line. Repeated presses still alternate between the two positions.
In EditPad 7 and 8 you configure the default font through the text layout configuration that you can select for each file type on the Editor page in the file type configuration. Though this may seem needlessly complicated, the reality is that all these settings are needed for EditPad to display text to everybody’s satisfaction. If you select a monospaced font, do you want EditPad to force the text to be perfectly monospaced even when the font isn’t? Do you want a font like Fira Code to form ASCII ligatures or not? If you answer yes to one of these questions then you need to use your font with the “monospaced left-to-right only” text layout. Otherwise select the “left-to-right only” text layout. If you like to switch between fonts, create a text layout configuration for each of your fonts. Switch between fonts by switching text layouts using the Options|Text Layout submenu. Then you’ll always have the perfect settings and fallbacks for each font.
Things get even more complicated if you want EditPad to properly handle scripts that are not written (strictly) from left to right (something that a lot of programmers’ text editors simply can’t do). Then you’ll need one of the complex script text layouts. Many such scripts require fonts specially designed for them. In EditPad you can add such fonts as fallback fonts in the text layout configuration. When your main font does not support a certain script, EditPad will use the topmost fallback font that does. As a plain text editor, EditPad requires all text on a line to be the same height. Since multiple fallback fonts may be used on the same line EditPad needs to force all fonts to be the same height in pixels. But the font size you specify in the text layout configuration is in points (1/72nd of an inch) as that is how font sizes are normally set in Windows. If you don’t use fallback fonts EditPad simply creates the font at the given size in points. Depending on the design of the font (short or long extenders) this may result in shorter or taller lines. When you do use fallback fonts, EditPad needs to determine the line height in pixels and then force all fonts to fit. We’ve improved this calculation so that the size of the main font will be (very nearly) the same regardless of whether you are using fallback fonts or not. For many fonts this will result in slightly larger text than in previous versions of EditPad because previous versions made the text too small. The predefined complex script text layouts compensated for this by specifying a larger font size. If you find that your text appears too large in EditPad 8.2.0 then go into the text layout configuration and reduce the font size.
Various other minor fixes and improvements were also made. The version history has the complete list.
Like File|Open, File|Tail replaces the active tab with the newly opened file if the active tab is empty and untitled. It now also correctly starts to continuously reload the active file if you selected that option. Previously, it would only start to continuously reload after switching to another file and back.
File|Delete now activates the previous or next open file exactly as File|Close does. There will no longer be any situations in which File|Delete reopens a closed file in a managed project.
EditPad 8 is much more diligent about showing a progress meter during long search operations, allowing you to abort them. Unfortunately, clicking the Abort button on the progress meter shown by Search|Find on Disk did not hide the progress meter. This prevented you from interacting with the rest of EditPad, making it unusable. Now the progress meter is correctly hidden when you abort a search on disk.
After using View|Split Editor, you can make two selections in the file, one in each half of the editor. Block|Swap Selections swaps the text between those selections. It was broken in 8.1.0 and 8.1.1, failing with an access violation error in certain situations.
The syntax coloring schemes for CSS and Markdown and the file navigation schemes for Delphi and XML have been improved to handle CSS variable names, escaped brackets in Markdown links, Delphi routines with nested record type declarations, and correctly adding folding points on XML tags when building the file navigation tree based on id or name attributes.
This release brings fixes and improvements to how EditPad saves and opens working copies. You configure this on the Save Files page in the Preferences. If you install EditPad 8 for the first time, working copies are again enabled by default, as they were in EditPad 7. Saving working copies is strongly recommended to prevent data loss in case your computer loses power or Windows decides to reboot at an inopportune time. With the fixes and improvements in this release, you should never need to notice working copies were saved at all when EditPad is closed normally. You can tell EditPad to save working copies in a specific folder if you want to keep them out of the way of your actual files. This option was introduced in EditPad 8.0.0.
EditPad 8 makes sure all working copies are saved when your computer goes to sleep or into hibernation. Windows notifies applications before the computer sleeps, but does not provide any opportunity to prompt to save unsaved changes. Saving working copies ensures you don’t lose your work if your computer never wakes up from sleep. That can happen if your computer runs out of battery power while sleeping. Version 8.1.2 fixes a bug that caused the working copies to take over the role of the actual files if you continued working with EditPad after your computer resumed from sleep or hibernation. With this fix, you won’t notice the working copies were ever saved (unless you go looking for them with your file manager). If you do turn off the option to save working copies at regular intervals, then 8.1.2 no longer saves them when your computer goes to sleep either.
EditPad automatically deletes all working copies when you close all files or EditPad itself. Working copies are only left behind if your PC crashes or loses power or if EditPad is terminated abnormally while EditPad had files with unsaved changes open. Next time you start EditPad, it automatically opens the working copies of untitled files. It automatically opens all working copies if you specified an absolute path to a folder to save working copies in. When you open files for which working copies were left behind, EditPad opens those working copies along with the actual files. When you decide you want to keep a working copy, use File|Save As to save it as the original file. If you want to discard a working copy, use File|Delete to get rid of it. None of this is new. What is new is that EditPad now only opens working copies automatically if you have enabled the option to save working copies at regular intervals. If you disable it, EditPad now ignores any working copies that may have been left behind in the past. Working copies saved during the active EditPad session are deleted immediately when you turn off the option to save working copies.
Also on the Save Files page on the Preferences, you have options to tell EditPad what to do when you close files with unsaved changes. Saving untitled files automatically now saves them as now saves them as “Untitled 1.txt” instead of as “Working Copy of Untitled 1.txt“. This means they are no longer automatically opened when you start EditPad, unless you turn on the option to save the workspace. They are now added to the history list in the File|Open submenu, allowing you to reopen them quickly. If you do reopen the automatically saved file “Untitled 1.txt“, edit it, and close it without saving, then EditPad again saves it automatically using the same untitled file number. The setting for closing untitled files now also applies to files that been saved using an “Untitled” file name.
Previous EditPad 8.x.x releases automatically saved files with unsaved changes when you shut down or restarted your PC if you had the option to save working copies enabled. EditPad 8.1.2 restores the behavior of EditPad 7. Files are saved automatically or discarded automatically upon reboot if that’s what you selected for closing unsaved files. If you chose to prompt, then EditPad only prompts to save when working copies are disabled. When working copies are enabled, EditPad instead makes sure the working copies are up-to-date and leaves them behind, allowing your PC to restart immediately. If working copies are disabled, EditPad does try to prompt to save. But Windows 8 and later cover the screen when the reboot or shutdown is initiated. So you have to cancel it to be able to see EditPad’s prompt to save. If Windows decides to restart on its own while you are away from your PC, you won’t have any opportunity to react to EditPad’s prompt and the reboot will proceed without EditPad saving your changes. So this is another good reason to have working copies enabled.
If you have enabled both the options to save the workspace and to show EditPad’s icon in the notification area, then closing EditPad keeps EditPad running without actually closing any files. This way EditPad can pop back up immediately next time you need it, without wasting time to reload your workspace. You do get a prompt to save files with unsaved changes if you configured EditPad to prompt. But if you choose not to save, the unsaved changes do remain in memory. All this is unchanged from previous versions. What is new is that with EditPad closed by the notification icon still visible and unsaved changes still in memory, EditPad will not prompt a second time to save those unsaved changes if you restart your PC or right-click the icon and select Exit. Your choice not to save the changes when you closed EditPad’s window is honored automatically.
Tab stop positions were slightly off in previous 8.x.x releases when using the left-to-right text layout with a proportionally spaced font. This could cause the cursor to be positioned incorrectly after the first tab on a line.
When using the Search toolbar on its own, the small Search and Replace boxes automatically scroll their contents to keep the cursor visible when you enter a search term that is longer than the width of the box. This scrolling is now done correctly when you clear the search term or replacement.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.1.2 version history
EditPad Pro includes file navigation schemes for many file formats and programming language to show the structure of the file on the File Navigator panel. The C# scheme was fixed to correctly handle methods containing const declarations. The Groovy scheme was improved to add folding points to lists if you select “add automatic folding points from the file navigation scheme” on the Navigation page in the file type configuration.
EditPad 8 allows the /l command line parameter to be used in combination with \c and \s. The latter two place the cursor at a byte or select a range of bytes when used alone. When used in combination with /l, \c specifies the column to place the cursor at and \s the column range to select on the line specified by \l. This worked correctly for \c. But \s sometimes selected the wrong columns, or even text at the end of the preceding line when the line specified by \l contained tabs or had fewer columns than you tried to select. This has been fixed.
EditPad 8.0.0 broke the ability to download clip collections shared by others via the Share Clip Collections button on the toolbar on the Clip Collection panel. This has been fixed.
This release fixes a serious performance issue that was introduced with EditPad Pro 8.0.0. It affected files that were large enough to be treated as huge files. You can set the size threshold for this on the Open Files page in the Preferences. Files that are larger are only partially read into memory. EditPad Pro will unload and reload parts of such files as needed. The “as needed” part requires EditPad Pro to do some extra bookkeeping to make sure the parts it is working on are kept in memory. This bookkeeping was where the performance bug lay. With this fix, EditPad Pro 8 performs similarly to EditPad Pro 7 in this regard.
EditPad Pro 8 has additional options for huge files. You can specify how much memory EditPad Pro may use to keep unedited parts of huge files in memory. In EditPad Pro 7 this limit was fixed at 256 MB. If your PC has lots of free RAM, you can increase the limit for better performance. But you should not set it too high. Having to re-read parts of your file from disk slows down EditPad. But your whole PC will slow down much more if Windows starts swapping out memory to disk.
There is also a new option to swap modified parts of huge files out to disk. In previous 8.0.x releases, clearing the checkbox did not actually turn off the feature. Now it does. When this option is off, EditPad Pro 8 keeps all edited parts of huge files in memory, just like EditPad Pro 7 did. It then relies on Windows to swap out memory to disk when you edit files larger than the amount of RAM in your PC. When this happens, all the applications running on your computer will slow down. If you tell EditPad to swap out parts of edited files to disk then EditPad will slow down when you edit a file larger than the limit. But other applications will not have their memory swapped out to disk because of EditPad.
The Block|Prefix and Block|Suffix menu items have been restored. In EditPad Pro 7 and prior these menu items were the only way to insert the same text on each line at the left hand side or the right hand side of a rectangular selection. We received many complaints over the years how this was poor design and that it should be possible to insert text on all lines in a rectangular selection by simply typing that text on the keyboard. EditPad 8 now supports this. The help topic for Block|Rectangular Selections explains how this works. To drive home the point that EditPad 8 now supports direct column editing, we removed the much-criticized Block|Prefix and Block|Suffix menu items in EditPad Pro 8.0.0. We’ve since heard from the “other half” of our users that they really missed the Block|Prefix and Block|Suffix menu items as they also provided an easy way to insert something at the start and end of each line in the selection, without having to make a rectangular selection, and without needing the lines to be the same length. So we’ve brought back these commands. They work in the same way as they did in EditPad Pro 7. Direct column editing is still supported too. If you’ve customized the menus, you’ll need to customize them again to add these two menu items if you want them.
On the Save Files page in the Preferences, there is now a separate option for what to do when closing a previously saved file that you made completely empty without saving. The default setting is to automatically discard the changes. This default behavior restores the behavior of EditPad 7 and prior, which never automatically saved or prompted to save empty files, regardless of your setting in the Preferences. This option does not affect empty untitled files. Those are always discarded.
The thin vertical lines that separate groups of toolbar buttons are now a little more visible when using the dark theme.
You can select multiple files when using File|Open. When selecting a large number of files, EditPad may need some time to open them all. If this takes more than one second, EditPad now shows a progress meter.
When you play back a macro (without repeating it through Organize Macros), EditPad does not show a progress meter for the macro. But actions performed by the macro, such as a Replace All, may still show their own progress meters. Now, clicking the Abort button on such a progress meter not only aborts that action, but also stops macro playback.
EditPad’s FTP panel now supports additional key exchange algorithms for SFTP and SSH. If your previous version of EditPad said “invalid key exchange algorithm” when you tried to connect via SFTP or SSH then you should now be able to connect with EditPad 8.1.0.
If you change some settings when connecting to an FTP server that you previously added to your FTP favorites, then the FTP server’s entry in the FTP favorites is now automatically updated with the new settings. This is particularly useful if you imported FTP favorites that you exported from EditPad Pro 7. EditPad Pro 8 will not read the passwords from EditPad Pro 7 FTP favorites. With this change, entering your password and ticking the option to remember it now automatically stores the password in your EditPad Pro 8 favorites.
The Extra|Delete Duplicate Lines command now uses a more efficient algorithm. It no longer pegs the CPU at 100%. The “anywhere in the scope” option no longer slows it down as much as before, particularly when most of the lines in the file are duplicated many times throughout the file.
The syntax coloring scheme for Markdown now supports the full Markdown syntax down to 3 levels of nested list items. You can have a 4th level of list items, but not much Markdown within the 4th level items.
This release also fixes a whole bunch of bugs. The version history has the complete list.
EditPad Pro 8.0.5 (this version only) had a bug that made it fail to update its syntax coloring when live spelling was enabled but no spell checking dictionaries were installed. When you edited a file it would display the new text with the old colors, making the colors look completely garbled. This has been fixed so that enabling live spelling has no impact when there are no dictionaries.
RGB Preview now also works correctly when live spelling is enabled without any dictionaries. In previous 8.0.x releases, RGB preview would use the spell check colors (wavy red underline) instead of the RGB colors.
Live spelling is enabled by default for file types such as plain text and HTML. But EditPad Pro’s installer does not include any dictionaries. You can download those via the Colors and Syntax page in the file type configuration. You can toggle live spelling there too.
If the active file is large enough to use background threads, then turning on View|Split Editor while word wrap is on or turning word wrap on while the view was split could cause a variety of errors. Most of these issues were resolved in 8.0.5. The remaining issues should be resolved now.
The PHP file navigation scheme now correctly adds folding ranges on pairs of braces when you configure the PHP file type to add detailed automatic folding points.
EditPad 8 can form ASCII ligatures with fonts such as Fira Code, Monoid, and Hasklig. Exactly which ligatures are formed depends on the font. Fira Code and Monoid, for example, render != as ≠. The file still contains the separate ! and * characters. It’s only their appearance that changes. Each is displayed as half the ≠ sign.
To enable ASCII ligatures, select one of these fonts in the text layout configuration and set “text layout and direction” to “monospaced left-to-right only” or to one of the two “complex script” options. Complex script layouts can display ligature parts with different colors. If you select the ! in != then you will see ≠ with its left half selected. The “monospaced left-to-right only” text layout cannot display parts of ligatures with different colors. If you select the ! in != then the ligature is temporarily broken. You will see a selected ! and an unselected = next to it. This can actually be a benefit as it lets you clearly see which character’s you’re editing.
EditPad always breaks ligatures if the syntax coloring scheme applies its colors to characters separately. The assumption is that when characters are matched separately they probably don’t form a single entity and thus shouldn’t be combined into a ligature. We’ve now tweaked that assumption do that if the syntax coloring scheme uses the exact same scheme element to separately match adjacent characters then those matches are now combined to allow ligatures to be formed. The C# scheme, for example, has a scheme element that separately matches the characters in C# operators. Previously this meant C# operators didn’t form ligatures. Now, they do.
OpenType fonts, which include Hasklig, now appear in the list of fonts in the text layout configuration dialog when you don’t check the “allow bitmapped fonts” option. OpenType fonts are not bitmapped. If you do select an actual bitmapped font for a text layout, then next time you want to edit that text layout the “allow bitmapped fonts” option will be automatically checked so that your chosen font can be reselected.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.0.6 version history
EditPad 8 can apply word wrapping to a file from top to bottom and from bottom to top at the same time. This allows you to access both the start and the end of the file immediately after opening the file, no matter how many lines there are in the file. If you have a quad core or better CPU it can also make word wrapping twice as fast. On a dual core you’ll still get the instant access benefit, but not the full performance benefit as EditPad needs CPU time for other things too.
The 64-bit version of EditPad 8.0.4 (this version only) had a bug that messed up word wrap positions when wrapping the bottom half of a file larger than 512 KB. This could cause line breaks to be visualized in the middle of lines and generally made the bottom half of the file impossible to edit unless word wrap was turned off.
Two other word wrap bugs introduced with EditPad 8.0.0 were also fixed. If you edit the line near the middle of the file where the two word wrapping threads met each other, that line is now rewrapped correctly. Previously it was not rewrapped at all after editing. Files with no line breaks at all are now also rewrapped correctly. If the file is large enough to use background threads but has no line breaks at all, then previously the entire file lost its word wrapping if you edited the only line in the file.
If the active file is large enough to use background threads, then turning on View|Split Editor while word wrap is on or turning word wrap on while the view was split could cause a variety of errors. These issues have been resolved.
EditPad 8 syntax coloring schemes can highlight RGB color numbers and CSS color names with the actual colors they represent. The included HTML and CSS schemes support this. You can enable this with the RGB preview checkbox on the Colors and Syntax page in the file type configuration. Enabling this option together with live syntax-aware spell checking could cause misspelled words to be highlighted with one of the RGB preview colors instead of with the wavy red underline when switching between files. The highlighting would correct itself when you edited the file. Now the colors are always correct when you enable both these options.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.0.5 version history
The 64-bit version of EditPad 8 is now compatible with CPUs that do not support SSSE 3 or SSE 4.1. This includes Intel Pentium CPUs released until 2010 and AMD Athlon and Phenom CPUs released until 2012. EditPad 8 would trigger an “external exception” if you tried to edit anything when running on these older CPUs. These fixes should make the 64-bit version of EditPad 8 compatible with all Intel and AMD CPUs that can run the 64-bit versions of Windows XP and later, all the way back to the original Athlon 64 from 2003.
While EditPad 8 will run on old single core CPUs, EditPad 8 is designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. We recommend a dual core CPU as a minimum to run EditPad 8 and a quad core CPU to work with larger files. EditPad Pro 8 can take advantage of up to 8 CPU cores, depending on whether you’ve enabled features such as word wrap, syntax coloring, file navigation, and indentation indicators.
EditPad Pro 8 did not remember the “remember password” setting for FTP connections when you closed and restarted EditPad or when you added a connection to your FTP favorites. This caused it to forget the actual password too. After upgrading to 8.0.4 you’ll need to enter your password and tick “remember password” one more time to make it stick. If you import FTP favorites from EditPad Pro 7, you’ll need to re-enter the passwords for the imported FTP connections. FTP passwords are not compatible between EditPad Pro 7 and 8.
On operating systems such as Linux, files often don’t have an extension. EditPad 8 now lets you use the *. file mask in the file type configuration to match files without an extension. This file mask does not work in EditPad 7 and prior. EditPad 8’s default file types include one labeled “without extension” that uses this file mask. You can add or remove this file type as you like.
But the type of a file without an extension is usually better determined from the file’s contents. Therefore, when a file is matched by a file type with the *. file mask, EditPad now uses the “regular expression to detect magic value at the start of the file” of all file types to select a file type based on the file’s contents. Previously, it only used these regexes when no file type other than the “unspecified file type” at the top of the list had a file mask matching the file’s name or extension.
EditPad Pro 8 is capable of adding line breaks and indentation to files that do not have any line breaks while the file is being loaded. This makes editing such files much more comfortable. Exactly where line breaks are added and how much the lines are indented is determined by a new kind of syntax coloring scheme. The JSON and CSS schemes included with EditPad Pro 8 can do this in addition to providing normal syntax coloring. For XML there is a special (breaking) scheme that is optimized for adding line breaks to files that don’t have any. EditPad Pro 8.0.4 fixes a bug that could cause the last bit of text at the very end of the file to be missing after the file was loaded. It now also correctly handles “breaking” schemes that use the option “toggle back to previous subscheme” in the scheme editor. None of the “breaking” schemes included with EditPad Pro 8 use this option. But you can use it in schemes you create with the custom syntax coloring scheme editor. You can now test your custom “breaking” schemes with version 5.1.0 of the scheme editor. When you load a test file with no line breaks in the new scheme editor, it keeps an in-memory copy of that file. It reloads the in-memory copy and again adds line breaks to it each time you preview your scheme.
EditPad Pro 8 can automatically trim trailing whitespace from the end of files that you’ve edited. You can set the default for each file type with the “trim trailing space” on the Editor page in the file type configuration. You can toggle it for the active file with the Extra|Auto Trim Trailing Whitespace menu item. Now, automatically trimming trailing whitespace no longer removes whitespace to the left of the cursor.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.0.4 version history
EditPad Pro can show two rows of tabs: one for projects, and one for files. By default, the tabs for projects are only shown when you have more than one project open. If you don’t use projects then you never see the second row of tabs with this option. But importing preferences from EditPad Pro 7 did not correctly import the option to show or hide the project tabs. This has been fixed. But if you already imported your preferences, you can simply set the option the way you like it on the Tabs page in the Preferences. There is a similar option for file tabs too.
Several improvements and fixes were made to the Search panel. Line By Line mode now places the cursor at the start of the line when a matched line is selected. This way the matched line is highlighted as the active line. Triple-clicking a line to select it now does this as well. Previously, the cursor would be placed at the end of the selection which is at the start of the next line as the line break is also selected. This also makes Line By Line search and triple-clicking a line consistent with double-clicking a line number which already put the cursor at the start of the line in EditPad 7 and prior.
Also on the Search panel, turning on Whole Words Only when the search term is literal text that does not begin and end with a word character produced inconsistent results in EditPad 7. You can’t really search for a whole word if your search term is not a whole word (or a phrase starting and ending with whole words). Therefore, EditPad 8 disables Whole Words only in this situation. But previous 8.0.x releases did not take the word character settings in the text layout configuration into account when deciding to enable or disable the option as EditPad does when searching for literal text. This has been fixed.
If you opened many files at once then searching for a search term that included literal line breaks through all open files no longer fails if some of those files have never been the active file yet since opening them.
When you use Search|Replace All with a regular expression, EditPad first finds all the regex matches that need to be replaced before replacing them all. This ensures that the matches of regular expressions that use anchors or lookaround aren’t affected by the replacements. EditPad 8.0.x used an excessive amount of memory when tracking the replacements to be made if the replacement string used backreferences (which means the replacement text is different for each regex match). It could make EditPad run out of memory if it had to make tens of thousand of replacements in the same file. This has been fixed. Memory usage is now similar to what it was in EditPad 7 which easily allows millions of replacements to be made in a single file.
If you insert a a clip from the Clip Collection panel while recording a macro then the macro stores the contents of the clip. This worked correctly in EditPad Pro 7 but was broken in EditPad Pro 8. Such macros could not be imported and they would not play back correctly if you recorded them again. This has been fixed. If some macros were missing after you imported your EditPad Pro 7 macros, import them again.
EditPad Pro 8 provides several ways to copy or export text formatted with EditPad Pro’s syntax coloring to word processors and other applications that can work with formatted text. This release brings some tweaks and fixes. Edit|Copy as RTF and Edit|Copy as HTML are now off by default when you run EditPad Pro 8 the first time. Importing EditPad Pro 7 preferences sets Edit|Copy as RTF to your preference from EditPad Pro 7 and turns off Edit|Copy as HTML. The Block|Export to HTML or RTF command now correctly exports only the selected text when exporting to an .html file. You can use File|Export to HTML or RTF if you want to export the whole file.
EditPad 8 has a new Brackets page on the File Type Configuration dialog. It has the options for highlighting matching brackets that EditPad 7 had on the Colors & Syntax page. But it also has several new options that enable new abilities, including options to automatically insert matching brackets and automatically insert line breaks as you type. Exactly how when and where brackets and line breaks are inserted depends on the syntax coloring scheme. The checkboxes for these two options now correctly indicate their current state when you open the File Type Configuration dialog or select another file type in the list.
EditPad 8 supports elastic tab stops. These automatically shift their positions based on the contents of adjacent lines with the same number of tabs so that you can easily align columns with a single tab. Elastic tab stops are incompatible with word wrapping. Turning on word wrapping shows a warning that elastic tab stops will be disabled while word wrapping is enabled. This warning now has a “don’t show this again” checkbox so that you can turn on word wrap and turn off elastic tab stops with just one click.
If you click the Edit Clip button on the Clip Collection panel and you don’t have AceText installed then EditPad shows a built-in dialog box for editing the clip. The edit control on this dialog now uses the same setting as EditPad’s main editor. This way the clip’s contents appear in exactly the same way in the Edit Clip dialog as they would in the main editor if you inserted the clip into the active file.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.0.3 version history
This release fixes more bugs introduced by EditPad Pro 8.0.0. View|Other Editor Joint Scrolling now works correctly when scrolling through the bottom half of a file.
On the Editor page in the Preferences, there is a new option to highlight all lines that are wrapped from the same line as the active line. This option now works correctly. Previously it would sometimes highlight the wrong lines. It would not remove the highlight when the editor lost keyboard focus if you turned off the option to maintain the highlighting.
EditPad 8 does not disable Search|Find Previous in regular expressions mode. If your regular expression turns out to be literal text then the Find Previous command simply searches backwards for that text, as if the regex option was turned off. Otherwise, it pops up a message to explain that regular expressions cannot search backwards. This message now pops up only once when you click the button. Previously, if you had Line By Line turned on, it would pop up for all previous lines in the file.
Search|Highlight All now correctly handles regular expressions in Line By Line mode. Previously it would highlight all lines that were visible below the bottommost visible line that needed to be highlighted.
When using a right-to-left text layout (for text in languages written from right to left), tabs were not laid out correctly from right to left. Now tabs are laid out from right to left again as EditPad 7 and Microsoft Notepad do. Switching between left-to-right and right-to-left files now moves the scroll bar to the other side of the editor, just like toggling the text direction of the active file with Options|Right-to-Left already did.
Hovering the mouse over a word flagged as misspelled by Live Spelling no longer changes the mouse pointer to a pointing hand. Keeping I-beam cursor makes it easier to place the text cursor to edit the misspelled word. You can still double-click misspelled words to open the spell checker to get a list of suggestions or to tell it to learn or ignore the word.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.0.2 version history
This release fixes a bunch of bugs introduced in last week’s major upgrade. In several situations, EditPad Lite 8.0.0 would fail to complete a task with an access violation. This included any command that may show a progress meter (including all the Search panel commands), selecting a file type in Options|File Types, or clicking OK or Apply on the Preferences dialog of a portable installation.
If you turned on the options to use the word under the cursor or the selected text as the default search term on the Search page in the Preferences, then pressing Ctrl+F now selects the default search term when using the Search toolbar with the small Search and Replace boxes. EditPad already did this when using the multi-line Search panel.
EditPad 8 supports files with paths longer than 260 characters. In EditPad 7 and prior, such files appeared to be empty. This was due to limitations in the Windows API. EditPad 8 can work around those. But this introduced a new bug that caused EditPad 8.0.0 to complain about command lines longer than 260 characters. One situation where you can get such a long command line is when selecting EditPad in the Send To submenu of the context men in Windows Explorer with many files selected. EditPad 8.0.1 will correctly handle command lines of any length as well as file paths of any length.
On the Navigation page in the file type configuration, most of the EditPad Pro 8 file navigation schemes allow you to choose whether (parts of) the file navigation tree should be sorted alphabetically and whether nodes should be expanded by default. These options now work correctly.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.0.1 version history
EditPad Pro 8 is a major upgrade from previous releases with lots of new features and improvements. These release notes only explain the most significant ones. The version history has the complete list.
The Advanced Options button in the installer now gives you a choice between installing EditPad for all users and installing for the current user only. The latter option enables a proper installation of EditPad with desktop icons and file associations, without requiring administrator privileges.
The most apparent change in EditPad 8 are the new toolbar icons. The new flat look of the icons better matches the flat look of Windows 10. EditPad includes them in 10 different sizes that cover all the scaling increments from 100% to 400% available in the basic display settings in Windows. EditPad can now correctly scale its toolbars on all PC and laptop displays, including small laptops with 4K screens. Toolbar icons can now be switched between small, medium, and large sizes by right-clicking the toolbar.
You can customize the mouse pointer on the Cursors page in the Preferences. You can now have a different pointer over selected text. Custom mouse pointers now support sizes larger than 32x32 when DPI scaling is set to 200% or more, supporting DPI scaling up to 400%. If you select a custom mouse pointer with inside and outside colors then those colors are also used for the mouse pointer that indicates scrolling when you click the editor with the mouse wheel. This scrolling cursor now supports all resolutions between 100% and 400% display scaling.
EditPad has a new dark theme that makes EditPad’s entire user interface use white text with black and dark gray backgrounds. You can toggle this theme with the View|Dark Theme menu item. The menu item also switches the color palettes assigned to file types between dark and light variants.
The Panels page in the Preferences has a new option to make the side panels use the same colors as the editor. This causes the side panels to change colors when switching between files that use different palettes. It makes EditPad’s colors more uniform.
You can select a syntax coloring scheme and a color palette for each file type on the Colors & Syntax page in the file type configuration. Many more predefined color palettes are now available. There are “Solarized” and “Harmonized” palettes with reduced contrast and monochrome palettes for which the color picker only shows a limited set of colors. For these palettes, the picker shows all the colors used in the selected palette in the order that they are first used so you can easily use exactly the same color for multiple elements. There are also new palettes optimized for the most common types of color blindness.
Each color palette now has an associated printing palette with black text on a pure white background. The printing palette is used as the default when printing. Selecting a palette with a colored background in the print preview now prints the file with that background color which may use a lot of ink.
Color palettes can now be exported into separate .ini files so you can easily share them with others.
The new “Editor: Extra space between lines” color allows you to display ruled lines by setting it to a different color than the plain text color and by adding extra space between lines in the text layout configuration.
You now have more options to customize individual colors. Many different underlining styles are now available, including a wavy underline typically used for misspelled words. Underline can now use a different color than the font. You can now add a strikeout, which can have the same or a different color as the font. Bold and italic now offer an “unchanged” choice that uses the style selected in the text layout configuration; this allows the “off” choice to force bold or italic to be off. The new Copy and Paste buttons make it easy to apply the same settings to the same named color. Selecting “default” as the background, text, or underline color for selected text now leaves that color unchanged when text is selected instead of using the highlighting colors of the Windows theme. This allows syntax coloring to remain visible when text is selected.
Many syntax coloring schemes have been improved. Batch file syntax coloring now supports bracket matching and better highlights environment variables. HTML and XML syntax coloring schemes now define entire opening tags including attributes as opening brackets rather than just the tag itself; in addition the angle brackets of opening and closing tags are now defined as brackets. This allows Block|Between Matching Brackets to properly select HTML tags and text between HTML tags. Whether angle brackets are matched separately can be chosen in the file type configuration. Perl syntax coloring now supports nested paired parentheses, brackets, and braces inside strings, regexes, and substitutions quoted with parentheses, brackets, or braces. PHP with JavaScript syntax coloring scheme can now highlight PHP code inside JavaScript.
With all the file types that EditPad Pro supports, the File|New and Options|File Type submenus and the drop-down lists in Open and Save dialogs can become very long. You can now reduce those lists by turning off the new “Show in file type selection lists” option on the Definition page in the file type configuration for file types that you don’t normally use. File types that you hide this way do remain functional. If you open a file that matches the file mask of a hidden file type, EditPad does use the hidden file type’s settings for that file.
Files normally have an extension such as .txt on the Windows platform. EditPad uses the extension to determine the file type, which determines the settings to use for the file. On UNIX platforms, text files often have no extension. EditPad now has a predefined “Without Extension” file type that determines EditPad’s settings for files without an extension. The file mask *. is now interpreted as a file masks for files without an extension (or any dot in their name at all) to make this file type possible.
Setting a file type’s default encoding to Unicode could cause problems when opening a file that is not Unicode. Setting the default encoding to UTF-16 and then opening a file that has ASCII text would appear as Chinese gibberish until you used Convert|Text Encoding to reinterpret with the correct legacy code page. Now you can specify a non-Unicode encoding for each file type that has Unicode as its default encoding. EditPad will use this fallback encoding for files that aren’t valid Unicode files or that reference unassigned code points.
The ASCII section of the hexadecimal editor now uses the file type’s default encoding or non-Unicode encoding if they are 8-bit encodings. The encoding from the Editor Preferences is used if they are not. You can use Convert|Text Encoding to change the encoding used for the ASCII section in hexadecimal mode.
EditPad now better supports modern programming fonts like Fira Code and Hasklig that can form ligatures of ASCII characters. It even uses these fonts by default for its monospaced text layouts if they are available when you first run EditPad.
Complex script text layouts previously supported most ASCII ligatures. Now they also support ligatures with parentheses and angle brackets. They work correctly with all fonts that support ASCII ligatures. Ligatures remain when they are partially selected or when syntax coloring applies different colors to the characters that form the ligature.
The monospaced left-to-right text layout previously did not support ASCII ligatures. Now it does. But it only works correctly with fonts like Fira Code and Hasklig that use one glyph per character even for ligatures. It does not work with fonts like DejaVu Sans Code that use one glyph per ligature. Ligatures are broken (showing the original characters) when they are partially selected or when syntax coloring applies different colors to the characters that would have formed the ligature. This text layout no longer clips italic overhang at the end of words or at color changes, as was already the case for other text layouts.
All text layouts now have independent options for treating underscores, hyphens, other punctuation, currency symbols, math symbols, and/or symbols as word characters.
The monospaced left-to-right text layout now assumes that characters in right-to-left scripts are stored in visual order in the file. This allows files from old (DOS) systems that did not support modern bidirectional editing to be displayed correctly. As a consequence, the monospaced left-to-right text layout also disables automatic font substitution. Only characters supported by the font will be displayed.
The non-monospaced left-to-right text layout still allows Windows font substitution, and does not support ligatures. Complex script text layouts now always use the main font for visualized spaces and generic line breaks.
Text files normally don’t contain control characters other than tabs or line breaks. But when they do, they would often be invisible in previous versions of EditPad because most fonts can’t display them. Now the text layout configuration allows you to choose how EditPad should visualize control characters. The options that use letter pairs (like NU for NULL), hexadecimal numbers, or Control+Letter indicators work regardless of the font. Other options like the IBM PC glyphs or Unicode glyphs do depend on the font. The new “Editor: Control characters” color in the color palette allows you to show control characters in a different color or apply an underline or strikeout to mark them as inappropriate for text files. In hexadecimal mode, the ASCII part of the editor also uses the setting from the text layout configuration to display control characters instead of showing a little bullet for all of them. The hex editor does not use the special color for control characters.
Using the Options menu to select a text layout or font that is different from the file type’s default for an individual file is now remembered as part of the file’s status, if you enabled the option to preserve file status in Preferences|Save Files.
EditPad’s ability to handle different tabbing and indentation styles has been greatly improved. The settings that deal with this have been moved onto a new Tabbing page in the file type configuration. The Tab Characters group has the options that determine the width of a tab. The Indentation group has the options that determine how many spaces or tabs are inserted or removed by Block|Indent and Block|Outdent.
Because other people may have their editors configured differently, you can now specify a regular expression that EditPad should use to detect the tab size. The regex needs to have a capturing group named “tab”. If this matches an integer between 2 and 32, that is taken as the tab size in spaces. Otherwise EditPad counts the number of characters matched by the group and takes that number as the tab size if it is between 2 and 8. If your regex also has a group named “tabspaces” then pressing the Tab key on the keyboard inserts spaces if that group finds a match other than “0”, “false”, “tab”, or “no”.
Turning on “elastic tab stops” makes EditPad dynamically calculate the width of tabs so that columns line up nicely for blocks of lines that have the same number of tabs, requiring only a single tab between the columns. Editing text that is followed by a tab on a particular line automatically adjusts the width of that tab on that line and all adjacent lines that have the at least that many tabs. When tab stops are elastic, the “tab size” setting applies only to tabs at the start of the line (indentation tabs). The “smallest gap between text” is the minimum tab size for other tabs. The key benefit of elastic tab stops is that it allows columns to line up neatly even with proportionally spaced fonts, and they will continue to line up neatly when you change the font or change the tab size. They will also line up neatly for other people, as long as you took care to only use one tab to delimit columns and indent lines only using tabs, and the other people’s editor also uses elastic tab stops.
Turn on “tab-separated values” to show tab-delimited, comma-delimited (CSV), or any-one-character-delimited files with properly aligned columns. You can enter any single character as the value delimiter. That character is then spaced like tab and shown with the color for visualized whitespace. You can also specify a quote and/or an escape character to be able to use the value delimiter within values as well. When you edit the file, the size of the tab that follows the edit is automatically adjusted throughout the entire file to make all the columns line up neatly. EditPad ships with predefined “comma-separated values” and “tab-separated values” file types for .csv and .tsv file types that use these options.
Turn on “keep the same level of indentation when pressing enter” to have the new line indented by the same amount as the previous line. This option was labeled “automatically indent new lines when pressing enter” in previous versions of EditPad. Options|Keep Indent toggles this option for the active file. This menu item was previously labeled Auto Indent.
The old “auto indent” feature was renamed to “keep indent” because that more accurately describes what it does and because EditPad Pro 8 now has real automatic indentation that can increase and decrease the amount of indentation. This requires a syntax coloring scheme that specifies which syntax in your file should increase or decrease indentation. Most of the schemes included with EditPad Pro 8 do this. Then you can turn on “automatically indent or outdent new lines based on the syntax coloring scheme” for the file type or toggle Options|Auto Indent for the file. If the scheme specifies that certain syntax should be treated like braces in C-style languages or like tags in markup languages then you can specify your indentation style on the new Brackets page in the file type configuration.
The Block|Indent and Block|Outdent can now detect the indentation size of text surrounding the block to be indented or outdented. They look at a block of 1,000 lines. If all the lines are indented by tabs, then the indentation size is one tab. If all the lines are indented by a multiple of the same number of spaces, then the indentation size is that number of spaces. Otherwise, the setting from the file type configuration is used.
When word wrap is on, you now have more options for indenting wrapped lines. Wrapped lines can be indented more or less than that line, relative to it. Or then can be indented a fixed amount.
On the Navigation page in the file type configuration, you can now enable indentation indicators. These are thin vertical lines or differently colored backgrounds that visualize how much lines are indented. You can enable them for all lines, or for lines surrounded by matching brackets or tags, or for lines inside a foldable range. You can configure their appearance via the four “Editor: Indentation level” colors in the file type’s palette. Options|Visualize Indentation lets you toggle the indentation indicators for the active file.
When you open a large file, you can now instantly jump to the end of the file by pressing Ctrl+End on the keyboard or by dragging the scroll bar’s thumb to the bottom. Previously you had to wait for EditPad to scan the whole file for line breaks to be able to access the end of the file. Now you only need to wait if you want to access the middle of the file and you only need to wait half as long. The Cursors page in the Preferences has a new option to place the cursor at the end of the file instead of at the top of the file when opening a file for which EditPad has not remembered an editing position.
File|Tail lets you load only the tail end of a large file. You can also use it to tell EditPad Pro that a file is only appended to when it grows. This way EditPad Pro only needs to load the newly added part instead of reloading the entire file. EditPad Pro can do so automatically on an interval, allowing you to monitor live log files. The Tail button on the FTP panel lets you do the same for files on an FTP server.
Hexadecimal mode now adds extra bytes to the address column as needed when opening files larger than 4 GB.
On the Open Files page in the Preferences, you can configure a threshold for huge files. Files smaller than that are kept in memory entirely. Files larger than that are loaded into memory as needed, allowing you to open files that are larger than the amount of RAM in your PC. New is that you can also configure how much memory EditPad Pro may use to keep the “needed” parts in memory. Increasing this limit improves performance as it reduces the need to reload these parts from disk as you move through the file, at a cost of making EditPad Pro use more memory. Also new is that EditPad Pro can swap modified parts of huge files out to disk when a chosen memory limit is reached. You can select the folder that should be used as temporary storage, preferably on your PC’s fastest drive.
Rectangular selections can now be zero columns wide. Those appear as a thick vertical line using the selection background color (or the selection underline or text color if no background color is used for selections). This enables direct column editing. If persistent selections are off, typing into a rectangular selection replaces the selection with the typed character on each line. Pressing Delete or backspace deletes the whole selection. If persistent selections are on, typing at the edge of a selection inserts the character on each line at that edge. Pressing Delete or Backspace deletes one character at the edge of the selection without otherwise changing the selection. That character may be inside or outside the selection. Pasting text that does not contain line breaks pastes it on each line (replacing the selected columns if selections are not persistent). After making an edit, a new selection is made that is zero columns wide so that editing can continue naturally.
Persistent selection mode can now be toggled via a menu item in the Block menu or its corresponding toolbar option, instead of having to go through the Preferences dialog. You may need to toggle this to make column editing or Instant Replace work for the task at hand.
The Instant Find Next/Previous and Instant Highlight commands now have icons so that you can place them as buttons on a toolbar. Some of these are on the main toolbar by default. This enables quick searches for other occurrences of the text under the cursor without using the Search panel at all. The new instant search options allow instant searches to be made case sensitive, restricted to whole words, or allowed to loop around the end of the file.
Instant Incremental Search allows you to search by typing in a search term without using the Search panel. Backspace goes to the previous search term. Arrow keys go to the following or preceding matches of the current search term.
Instant Replace allows you to replace all occurrences of a word or a selection by editing one of those occurrences. If there is a multi-line selection upon activation, then that becomes the search range. Editing any word within the search range automatically edits all occurrences of that word. Making a selection within the search range and editing it automatically edits all occurrences of the selected text. If selections are not persistent, moving the cursor outside the search range automatically ends Instant Replace. Regardless of whether selections are persistent, editing outside any highlighted matches automatically ends Instant Replace. If there is a non-multi-line selection upon activation, then all occurrences of the selected text are edited. Instant Replace works on the whole file and is automatically canceled when moving the cursor outside the text being edited. If there is no multi-line selection, and the selected text or the word under the cursor cannot be found, then Instant Replace is aborted as a failed search.
The Save Files page in the Preferences has new options for backups and working copies. Backup copies can now be limited by their total size. When restricting backups by age, backup copies older than a certain number of days are now reduced to one per day and backups older than a certain number of weeks are now reduced to one per week, instead of deleting all backups older than a certain number of days. This allows backups to be kept over a longer period without reaching the limit you set for their size or the number of copies.
If you select to keep multiple backups per file, you can now tell EditPad to automatically save the actual file every few minutes instead of saving a separate working copy. Separate working copies can now be saved in a specific folder or in a subfolder of the folder containing the original. Working copies are now saved when the system goes into standby or hibernation to prevent data loss if the system never resumes from standby or hibernation.
Preferences|Save Files now has separate options for closing files with unsaved changes and closing files that were never saved. This allows untitled files to be saved automatically without prompting. The choice for files with unsaved changes now affects files that were made empty.
When editing files via FTP, you can now tell EditPad Pro to use a local folder to save copies of the files you open. These local copies can be used to quickly reopen the same file later. They also enable local backup copies and local working copies according to your preferences for those. Local backups can be accessed via the History panel. In addition, you can configure each FTP connection to keep a single remote backup copy of each file that you save via FTP.
Previous versions of EditPad already recognized all Unicode line breaks. But the default line break style could only be set to CRLF pairs, LF-only, or CR-only. Now you can set any line break style as the default in the file type configuration. Previously, Ctrl+Enter always inserted a form feed character, which EditPad interprets as a page break. This is still the default. But in the file type configuration you can now select any line break style for Ctrl+Enter.
Previously, the Convert|Windows/UNIX/Mac menu items allowed you to convert between CRLF, LF-only, and CR-only line breaks. These commands left all other line breaks untouched. They have been replaced with a new Convert|Line Break Style menu item. When you select it you get a popup dialog that tells you how many line breaks of each style, including all the Unicode styles, your file contains. You can tick the line break styles you want to convert, and untick those you want to leave alone. You can select any line break style that you want to convert the selected styles to. This allows you to easily deal with errant line break styles in your file. You can still do the old Windows/UNIX/Mac conversion by selecting only CRLF, LF, and CR line breaks to be converted and selecting CRLF, LF, or CR as the new line break style.
The Convert|Line Break Style also allows you to select which line breaks are inserted by the Enter and Ctrl+Enter keys. You can select any line break style for these, regardless of which line breaks your file already contains. For the Enter key you can also choose “automatic” which is the old behavior of using the file’s dominant line break style. Line break style detection is now done whenever you insert or delete lines, possibly changing the status bar indicator and the line break style used by the Enter key if you choose the “automatic” option.
EditPad Pro can now convert between straight quotes, smart quotes, and primes. Straight quotes are the ASCII single and double quotes, and optionally the ASCII backtick and less-than and greater-than signs. Smart quotes are the “typographical quotes” as well as «guillemets», 《angle brackets》, and 「corner brackets」. Primes are the proper symbols for inches, feet, minutes, seconds, etc. 5′8″ is five feet eight inches.
EditPad Pro can convert straight to smart quotes, smart to straight quotes, any quotes to primes, primes to straight quotes, and any set of smart quotes to any other set of smart quotes. You can independently configure the opening and closing quotes. Predefined styles include “outward commas”, „inward commas“, ”high commas”, „low and high commas”, «outward guillemets», »inward guillemets«, 《angle brackets》, 「corner brackets」, and 『white corner brackets』. EditPad also knows the difference between a single quote and an apostrophe, even at the start of a word. 2019 with the century omitted is correctly written as ’19 with an apostrophe. Most word processors get this wrong. EditPad Pro gets this right.
If your syntax coloring scheme supports it, EditPad Pro can also convert between straight and smart quotes according to its rules. The provided HTML schemes, for example, convert straight quotes to smart quotes only outside HTML tags. EditPad Pro can do this conversion as you type or on demand on the selected text.
Files with paths longer than 260 characters are now opened and saved correctly. Previously EditPad acted as if such files did not exist.
Go|Go to Position replaces Go|Go to Line. In addition to moving the cursor to a specific line, you can now also move it to a specific column or move it to a specific byte offset. There are also options for selecting the text between the old and new cursor positions or expanding the existing selection to the new cursor position.
Extra|Sort Alphanumerically replaces Extra|Sort Alphabetically. Text that contains numbers now sorts the numbers as a whole, instead of sorting each digit separately. “A4” now comes before “A10” because 4 is less than 10.
Go|Back/Forward in Editing Position renamed from Previous/Next Editing Position to make it more obvious that these commands use chronological order like the Back/Forward in Edited Files commands and unlike the other Next/Previous commands.
Edit|Copy as Rich Text is now a separate menu item instead of a global preference in the Editor Preferences. Edit|Copy As HTML is a new command that complements it. You can use these commands to copy text with EditPad’s syntax coloring to paste into applications that support the RTF or HTML clipboard formats. File|Export to HTML or RTF and Block|Export to HTML or RTF allow you to save an HTML or RTF file that shows your text with EditPad’s syntax coloring.
EditPad’s regular expression syntax has been extended to support the newest features from other regex flavors. EditPad 8 uses exactly the same regex flavor as PowerGREP 5.
The Search toolbar now has a button labeled “Free” that enables free-spacing regular expressions.
EditPad now supports balancing groups like the .NET regex flavor and branch reset groups like Perl and PCRE. Also new is character class intersection using the [class&&[intersect]] syntax like Java and Ruby. The nested pair of square brackets is required. EditPad does not support the [class&&intersect] syntax as this could lead people to write [class&&intersect&&again] which behaves unpredictably in Java and Ruby.
In Perl and PCRE you can use \K to keep text out of the match to work around their restrictions on lookbehind. While \K is not really needed in EditPad with its unrestricted lookbehind, you can now use \K in EditPad like you would in Perl or PCRE if you are used to writing your regexes that way.
Perl, PCRE, and Ruby all support regular expression recursion and subroutines. These three have largely copied each others syntax, resulting in multiple ways to write recursion and subroutines. But these three have not copied each others matching behavior, resulting in clear behavioral differences despite the similar syntax. EditPad provides three sets of syntax for recursion and subroutine calls. Each set of syntax follows the matching behavior of one of these three flavors. Like in PCRE, (?P>name) does not capture, reverts capturing groups, and is atomic. You can remember this syntax by its similarity to that of atomic groups. Unlike PCRE, EditPad also supports (?P>1) and (?P>0) so you can specify this behavior for a numbered call and for recursion. Like in Perl, (?R), (?1), and (?&name) do not capture, revert capturing groups, and allow backtracking. You can remember this syntax by the ampersand that is used in &subroutine(); calls in Perl code. Finally, like in Ruby, \g<0>, \g<1>, and \g<name> capture the match of the subroutine call, do not revert capturing groups, and allow backtracking. You can remember this syntax by the fact that Ruby’s regex flavor does not support any other syntax for recursion and subroutine calls.
\h is a new shorthand character class for horizontal whitespace. It includes spaces, tabs, and all Unicode whitespace except line and paragraph breaks. \v used to be an escape that matches the vertical tab. Now \v is a shorthand for vertical whitespace. This includes the vertical tab, line breaks, page breaks, and paragraph breaks. \v matches CR and LF separately. \H and \V are the negated versions of these two new shorthands.
\R is a new special escape that matches any line break, including Unicode line breaks. What makes it special is that it treats CRLF pairs as indivisible. It matches CR and LF on their own when they occur in the subject string on their own. But when the subject string contains CRLF as a sequence, \R matches the entire CRLF pair.
\l and \u are now shorthands for \p{Ll} and \p{Lu}. These match any Unicode lowercase or uppercase character. These tokens are always case sensitive.
POSIX classes using the notation [[:alpha:]] now match only ASCII characters. The \p{Alpha} notation still matches Unicode characters. [[:d:]], [[:s:]], [[:w:]], [[:l:]], and [[:u:]] are now shorthands for [[:digit:]], [[:space:]], [[:word:]], [[:lower:]], and [[:upper:]]. You can treat them as ASCII-only versions of \d, \s, \w, \l, and \u.
\i and \c are now XML shorthand character classes. \cA through \cZ are no longer supported as control character escapes.
Octal escapes must now be written as \o{377}. The octal number can range from \o{0} to \o{177777}. The old \0377 syntax is now an error. EditPad has never supported \377 as that is too confusing with the syntax for backreferences. \0 too is now an error, instead of matching a literal zero. Use \x00 to match NULL bytes.
EditPad’s replacement string syntax has been extended with replacement string conditionals to make this possible. (?1matched:unmatched) and ${1:+matched:unmatched} insert matched if the first capturing group participated in the match or unmatched if it did not. Just like conditionals in the regular expression, a capturing group that finds a zero-length match is considered to have participated. The first syntax is borrowed from Boost. The second from PCRE2. When using named capturing groups, you can use (?{name}matched:unmatched) and ${name:+matched:unmatched} to reference them in replacement string conditionals. You can use the full replacement string syntax inside a conditional, including nested conditionals. Conditionals that reference non-existing groups are an error. If you want to insert the text captured by the group when it participated and something else when it did not, you can use ${group:-unmatched}.
As a consequence of adding this syntax, EditPad 8 treats \?, \:, \(, \), \{, and \} as escaped characters that insert one of these six punctuation characters literally. EditPad 7 and prior treated these as literal backslashes, inserting both the backslash and the following punctuation character literally into the replacement.
See also: EditPad Pro 8.0.0 version history
Yesterday’s release broke the ability to access the user forum. Selecting Help|Forum in the menu or clicking the Forum button on the toolbar triggered an access violation. This has been fixed.
This release brings a number of minor bug fixes. Using Block|Insert and selecting an empty file now simply does nothing instead of triggering an access violation error. Copying a rectangular selection to the clipboard, exiting EditPad, and then pasting into another EditPad instance now correctly pastes the text as a rectangular selection. The Help window no longer becomes unresponsive if EditPad shows a modal dialog box while the help window is already visible. Toolbar buttons and context menu items are now highlighted when you hover the mouse over them while the Search or Replace drop-down list has keyboard focus.
The Explore in EditPad command on the Files panel now shows the Explorer panel if it isn’t visible yet. Failed FTP transfers are now removed from the server’s queue so that EditPad doesn’t get stuck retrying a transfer that cannot succeed. In the Organize Macros dialog, renaming a macro now correctly maintains alphabetic order.
In hexadecimal mode, finding a search match no longer places the cursor one nibble beyond it if the cursor was in the middle of a byte before searching. Setting a bookmark in when using a large record size no longer causes EditPad to corrupt its memory.
You can specify how much memory EditPad is allowed to use for its undo history in Options|Preferences|System. This setting will never let you specify more than one quarter of the total amount of RAM available to EditPad. When EditPad’s undo history memory is exhausted, it trims the oldest actions from the undo history. This setting lets you balance EditPad’s memory usage and the ability to undo all your edits in all files since opening them. Now this setting will also not let you specify more than 2047 MB (just under 2 GB) even if your PC has more than 8 GB of RAM because EditPad’s undo system can’t track more than 2 GB of memory usage. Previously, if you set a limit higher than 2047 MB, EditPad would trim its undo history to a (much) lower limit than you actually specified.
In the Mouse Properties in the Windows Control Panel, you can tick an option to automatically move the pointer to the default button in a dialog box. EditPad respects this option and moves the mouse pointer when you open a dialog box. Previously, EditPad also moved the pointer after using a color picker (when customizing a palette, for example), which it shouldn’t.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.6.6 version history
This release brings a number of minor bug fixes. If you run both EditPad and AceText, and you double-click a clip on EditPad’s Clip Collection panel that contains parameters in the form of %PARAM%, then AceText pops up a dialog box where you can enter the text that those parameters should be substituted with. Previously this dialog could appear behind EditPad. Now EditPad ensures that AceText is in front of EditPad so that the parameters dialog will be too.
The Cut and Copy commands in the Edit menu work on the Search and Replace boxes when those have keyboard focus instead of the main editor. On the Editor page in the Preferences, you can turn on “copy active line when nothing is selected” to keep these commands enabled when there is no selection. If you turned this off, then previously the Cut and Copy commands where disabled when the main editor did not have a selection even if the Search or Replace box had keyboard focus. Now these commands are disabled only if the control that has keyboard focus does not have a selection.
Folding icons that you can add with the Fold|Fold menu item or that a file navigation scheme can add automatically now scale better on high DPI systems, making them larger and thus easier to click.
On the Search page in the Preferences, you can choose to always visualize spaces and tabs in the Search and Replace boxes on the multi-line search panel. This avoids head-scratching when EditPad won’t find your search term because of accidental spaces in the Search box. EditPad Pro now correctly respects this option when you switch to hexadecimal mode (to which this option doesn’t apply) and back to text mode.
When you turn on Search|Highlight All and then edit your search term, EditPad instantly updates the highlighting as you edit the search term. This now works correctly with the second half of the editor too when you’ve used View|Split Editor.
When adding other applications to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu, you can use various placeholders in the command line and working folder. All of those placeholders are now correctly substituted in the working folder, as they already were in the command line.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.6.5 version history
Previous versions of EditPad already scaled themselves quite well on high resolution displays. This release brings a few more tweaks to make EditPad look even better. Most obviously, the tabs that hold your files are now better proportioned on high DPI systems. The character map now scales its minimum cell size to keep large characters sets like Unicode legible on high resolution screens.
Using the Search|Highlight command with a regular expression and the Line By Line option turned on was broken since version 7.6.0. This has been fixed. The status bar indicator for the number of search matches is now reset to zero when a search using a new search term fails. Previously a search using a new search term had to find a match for the status bar indicator to restart counting from one.
File|Save now works correctly on files that are in use by another application as long as that other application does not keep a write lock on the file. Previously, File|Save would fail with an error message even if the other application did not keep a write lock.
On the Encoding page in the file type configuration, you can specify a default line break style for each file type. This line break style is used for line breaks that you insert by pressing Enter when you start with a new file of that type using the File|New submenu. It is also used if you use the Options|File Type submenu to change the file type of a file that does not yet have any line breaks. If you open an existing file that already has line breaks, then pressing Enter uses the line break style that is dominant in the file. New in 7.6.4 is that the default line break style is also used when you open an existing file of that type that does not yet have any line breaks. Previously, CRLF was used for such files.
The Block|Rectangular Selections menu item allows you to make rectangular selections the default selection type. It offers to turn off word wrap and switch to a monospaced font as needed to make rectangular selections possible. If it did turn off word wrap, then previously you had to click Options|Word Wrap twice to turn word wrap back on. Now once is enough. Turning on Block|Rectangular Selections allows the cursor to move beyond the end of a line to make it easy to select a rectangle covering lines of different lengths. Switching to another file that does not allow rectangular selections (because of font or word wrap) while Block|Rectangular Selections is still enabled caused the cursor to be allowed beyond the end of a line in the other file too. Now Block|Rectangular Selections no longer does this. If want the cursor to always be allowed beyond the end of a line, you can turn on the option for that in the Editor Preferences.
EditPad’s installer has been improved to better deal with Controlled Folder Access. This is the ransomware protection feature added to Windows Defender in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. It is unchanged in the April 2018 Update. EditPad’s installation will now go a bit more smoothly when Controlled Folder Access is enabled. EditPad’s installer now knows that when Windows Defender is not operational (because you’re using another anti-malware solution), Controlled Folder Access can’t be active and thus needn’t be dealt with. This avoids conflict between EditPad’s installer and certain heavy-handed anti-malware solutions such as BitDefender.
On the Files page in the tool configuration, you can select to reload the current file after running the tool. You should turn this on if the tool modifies the active file. If you also turned on the option in the Preferences to automatically reload files that have changed on disk, this could cause EditPad to reload the file more than once if it noticed that it had changed on disk before the tool finished. In a rare set of circumstances this double reload could cause EditPad to become unresponsive. Now, if a file is scheduled to be reloaded when a tool finishes running, EditPad will not reload that file until the tool finishes.
If you want a tool to work on an unsaved file, you can turn on the options to save the current file into a temporary file and to replace the file’s contents with the temporary file after running the tool. Previously, replacing the file’s contents with the temporary file could cause an “access violation” or “list index out of bounds” error when trying to close the file. This has been fixed.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.6.4 version history
The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update adds a new feature to Windows Defender called Controlled Folder Access. It is disabled by default. When enabled, it prevents applications from creating files and modifying files in folders commonly used to save personal data such as the Desktop and Documents folders. The goal is to block ransomware. In practice, it seems to block almost any application unless you specifically add it to the list applications allowed through Controlled Folder Access. Even applications like installers that run with Administrator privileges are blocked by it.
EditPad’s installer has been improved to better deal with Controlled Folder Access. It will no longer show an error message when it can’t create the desktop shortcut. This is the only aspect of EditPad’s installation that is blocked when Controlled Folder Access is enabled with the default settings. During a regular installation, EditPad’s installer adds EditPad to the list of applications allowed through Controlled Folder Access, even when Controlled Folder Access is disabled. This way you won’t run into issues when you try to save files in your Documents folder or on your desktop with EditPad. The installer can’t do this when creating a portable install as then the installer doesn’t have the Administrator privileges needed to modify settings in Windows Defender.
EditPad itself gets a bug fix that better deals with the consequences of Controlled Folder Access. When it blocks EditPad from overwriting an existing file, EditPad now displays an error message saying it can’t save the file. Previous versions of EditPad would pretend that the file was saved successfully. The reason is that Controlled Folder Access does not block applications from obtaining write access to existing files. It only blocks them from actually writing to the file. EditPad’s error handling previously did not detect this.
In Preferences|Open Files there is an option to automatically reload all files in the active project. If this is turned on then EditPad checks whether any of the files in the active project have been modified when you switch back to EditPad Pro after using another application. If EditPad needs to prompt for any of those files before reloading them, you get one prompt for all files that need to be reloaded. New in version 7.6.3 is that with this option turned on EditPad Pro also checks all files in the newly activated project when you switch between projects in EditPad Pro.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.6.3 version history
EditPad Pro now includes syntax coloring and file navigation schemes for Markdown. Markdown is a markup language. Its syntax is designed to look like plain text. Markdown is also a tool for converting the Markdown syntax to HTML. There are many (slightly) different variations of the Markdown syntax. The schemes included with EditPad Pro 7.6.2 implement the original version of Markdown from Daring Fireball.
A first time install of EditPad Pro 7.6.2 will have a file type for Markdown among the list of default file types. If you upgrade from 7.x.x to 7.6.2, the new file type is not added automatically. You can add it via Options|Configure File Types. The syntax coloring and file navigation schemes are automatically installed. But you do need to select them on the Colors & Syntax and Navigation tabs after adding the file type. Make sure that there is no *(user) indicator* next to the Markdown entry in the list of syntax coloring schemes. If there is you may be using an outdated user-contributed scheme for Markdown. This scheme had some serious issues. To remove it, click the Download button, select the Markdown scheme, and click the Uninstall button. This uninstalls only the downloaded (user) scheme. The official scheme included with 7.6.2 will remain.
EditPad Pro’s built-in FTP now better handles SSL and TLS certificates. The option to always accept a specific certificate for a specific server is now available for invalid certificates also. This gives you the opportunity to choose not to have to examine the same invalid certificate over and over in case you have to work with a misconfigured server. When you tell EditPad to remember an SSL or TLS certificate, it now does so by the fingerprint rather than by the serial. The fingerprint is guaranteed to be unique. The serial should also be unique, but isn’t guaranteed to be so. Because of this change, if you’ve told previous versions of EditPad Pro to always accept specific certificates, you’ll have to tell version 7.6.2 to accept those certificates once again. This change does not affect SSH server keys. Those were already remembered by their fingerprints.
EditPad’s spell checker received some fixes and improvements to how it handles capitalization. If the dictionary contains a word in all lowercase, then EditPad accepts any capitalization of the word as correctly spelled. This way any word can be capitalized at the start of sentences or in titles without having to duplicate all words in the dictionary. If the dictionary contains a word with at least one uppercase letter and does not contain the same word in all lowercase, then the spell checker requires the word to be capitalized in exactly the same way as it is in the dictionary. This way the spell checker can enforce capitalization of proper names, for example. EditPad’s spell checker has always worked this way for words in the main dictionary.
What’s new is that these rules now also apply to words that you have told EditPad to learn. Previously, EditPad accepted any capitalization of all learned words. This change may cause EditPad to flag words as misspelled that it previously didn’t. In particular, words that are all lowercase will now be flagged as misspelled if you had EditPad learn the capitalized variant. To fix this, you can tell EditPad to also learn the lowercase variant. Or you can click the Word List button in the spell checker panel to edit the list of learned words to remove unnecessary capitalization.
Learned replacements that only change the case of a word no longer (incorrectly) highlight occurrences of the word with the corrected case as misspelled. This fix, along with the improvement to make the user word list case sensitive, makes it possible to force your preferred capitalization of a word that is in all lowercase in the main dictionary. You can do this by clicking the Word List button on the spell checker panel and adding word=Word to the list of automatic replacements.
The View|Browser command is now better able to detect the default application for opening .html files (your default browser) on your computer. Depending on how your browser associates itself with .html files, previous versions of EditPad would sometimes use the browser that was previously associated with .html files on your computer. That could be the system default Edge or Internet Explorer.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.6.2 version history
EditPad Pro now supports TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 in addition to TLS 1.0 and SSL 3.0 when connecting to FTP servers that use TLS encryption, when sending email through SMTP servers that use TLS encryption and when accessing HTTPS URLs that you added to the Tools menu with the option to capture standard output. EditPad Pro automatically negotiates the highest version of TLS that is supported by both EditPad Pro and the server you’re trying to connect to. EditPad Pro now includes version 1.0.2k of the OpenSSL DLLs. You can replace these DLLs with a different version or even delete them if you don’t need TLS and SSL support.
With the Previous Editing Position and Next Editing Position commands in the Go menu you can go backward and forward through the places in the active file that you’ve recently made changes. This allows you to quickly jump back and forth when you’re editing a file in several different places. When using these commands in previous EditPad 7.x.x releases when part of the file was selected that selection would persist even when the option for persistent selections was turned off in the Editor Preferences. This could cause you to accidentally delete the selected text when typing or pasting text after moving to a previous editing position. Now these commands remove the selection when selections are not persistent, just like moving the cursor with the arrow keys or the mouse removes the selection.
The Convert|\uFFFF -> Characters menu item replaces Unicode escapes in the form of \uFFFF with the actual Unicode code point. In previous releases this command had a fundamental bug that caused it to misinterpret files or selections containing backslashes or letters u that weren’t part of a Unicode escape. This has been fixed so the conversion now works correctly on all files. You may need to use Convert|Text Encoding to change the file’s encoding to Unicode before using Convert|\uFFFF -> Characters so that all the converted code points can be represented in the file.
If your computer’s internet connection needs to go through a proxy server then you’ll need to give EditPad the details of that server if you want EditPad to be able to download syntax coloring and file navigation schemes (file type configuration), to connect to the forum, or to automatically check for news and updates. You can do this by clicking the Settings button in the scheme download windows or by clicking the Proxy button after selecting Help|Forum or Help|News and Updates in the menu. EditPad 7.5.0 and prior saved proxy settings with EditPad’s own preferences. EditPad 7.6.0 failed to save proxy settings. EditPad 7.6.1 saves proxy settings with the preferences for automatic news and updates. This allows your proxy settings to be used by all our applications (at least the latest versions that have the ability to check for news and updates). This way you need to configure your proxy server only once for all our applications.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.6.1 version history
Windows 10 changes the way the mouse wheel works in Windows. In older versions of Windows, the wheel scrolled the window that had keyboard focus, regardless of the position of the mouse pointer. In Windows 10, the wheel scrolls the window under the mouse pointer. EditPad now correctly implements the Windows 10 mouse wheel behavior when running on Windows 10. The mouse wheel behavior in EditPad is unchanged when running on an older version of Windows.
It is possible for a regular expression to match half of a CRLF pair. The regexes \r and \n are the simplest examples. But EditPad does not allow a search match to begin or end in the middle of a CRLF pair because its editor control treats all line breaks as indivisible. So when a regular expression matches half of a CRLF pair, EditPad extends the search match to include the whole CRLF pair so that searching selects the whole line break and making replacements replaces the whole line break. If you need to delete half of a CRLF pair to change the line break style, you can use the dedicated line break conversion commands in the Convert menu. None of this is new. What is new is that when you turn on Options|Visualize Line Breaks then the Search|Highlight command now correctly highlights entire CRLF pairs.
If you open a file using the FTP panel and then use the normal File|Save menu item or corresponding toolbar button then EditPad Pro automatically uploads the file back to FTP if you are still connected to the FTP server. Otherwise it prompts to reconnect. In previous versions this was broken if the FTP login (user name) contained an @ sign. You could open and edit the file, but clicking the Save button would pop up the FTP connection dialog even if you were still connected to the server. Now, clicking the Save button will automatically upload the file even when the login contains special characters.
On the Explorer and FTP panels you can tell EditPad Pro to show only files of a specific file type. EditPad now correctly remembers this file type when you exit and restart it.
In Options|Configure File Types|Navigation, you can tell EditPad Pro to add automatic folding points based on the indentation of the text. By default, EditPad uses this option only for Python scripts. In Python, indentation determines the structure of the code (whereas in other languages it is simply a visual aid for the programmer). But you can turn this on for any file type for which you want to be able to easily fold away indented lines. Previous versions of EditPad did not always correctly add automatic folding points based on indentation. This bug has been fixed.
EditPad is now able to automatically check for updates and other news. You can also make it check on request by selecting Help|News and Updates in the menu. When EditPad shows news or when the check on request tells you there is no news you can click the Settings button to choose which news items you want to see. By default, EditPad automatically shows news and updates for itself and any of our products that you’ve used in the past 30 days. Though for products other than EditPad, PowerGREP, and HelpScribble, that will only start working once they gain the ability to automatically show news.
News settings and history will be shared between all our products so you won’t see the same news more than once. Each product will automatically show at most one news item per day and at most one news item on request. So you don’t need to worry about ever being bombarded with news if you haven’t used our software for a while. You won’t see the news item announcing EditPad 7.6.0 either because that will be considered old news already when you’ve upgraded to EditPad 7.6.0.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.6.0 version history
EditPad now scales itself better on systems using 200% or more display scaling. On such systems, toolbar icons are doubled in size. This makes the small icons suitable for 200% display scaling and the large ones for 300% scaling. You can switch between small and large icons by right-clicking any toolbar and selecting Large Icons. Doing so no longer makes the menus and toolbars unresponsive. The about box and demo messages now double or triple their size on systems using 200% or 300% display scaling. The combo boxes for the search term and replacement text (when using the Search toolbar without the full Search panel) now scale their width on high DPI systems. The Extra|Compare Files dialog now scales correctly on high DPI systems. These changes mean that EditPad is now perfectly usable on all displays available on the market today, including laptops with 4K screens.
The spell checker now saves its list of learned words much faster. This removes any delay when changing the spell check language or when switching to another application after learning a new word. Previously, this delay could be quite long if thousands of words had already been learned. In addition, learned words with characters that are not supported by the system code page are now saved correctly.
EditPad Pro can capture the source of a web page if you add an URL as a tool and set the tool to capture standard output. This now works correctly with HTTPS URLs on servers using SNI, and with HTTP URLs that redirect to HTTPS.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.5.0 version history
This release brings a bunch of bug fixes. EditPad no longer crashes in the rare event that AceText crashes. Regexes now correctly handle quantifiers on literal line breaks (which match a line break in any style). Whole words only searches are now consistent between forwards searches, backwards searches, and match highlighting. The spell check panel now scales itself correctly on high DPI monitors. SSH key storage is no longer closed when connecting to an FTP server without SSH. FTP servers using wildcard SSL certificates are now handled correctly.
On Windows 10, EditPad now correctly preserves its window position between sessions. This fixes a bug introduced in 7.4.0 while retaining the improvements made in 7.4.0. On Windows 8, 8.1, and 10, the Files Panel now grays out closed files, like it does on Windows XP, Vista, and 7.
CSS syntax coloring and file navigation now supports @media, URLs, and quoted strings. HTML, ASP, and PHP syntax coloring now know that the HTML5 tags <keygen>, <source>, <track>, and <wbr> should not be paired with a closing tag. PL/SQL bracket matching now handles END IF, END LOOP and END CASE correctly.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.4.1 version history
This release brings some cosmetic changes to EditPad’s menus and toolbars to better fit the style of Windows 10. These changes only take effect when EditPad is actually running on Windows 10. Screen shots have been updated to show EditPad running on Windows 10.
When EditPad preserves its window position between sessions, it now takes into account that on Windows 10, windows have a border that is as thick as it was on Windows 8, but most of the border is now fully transparent. When restoring the preserved window position, EditPad now allows the visible portion of the window border to sit directly against the edge of the screen.
EditPad Pro’s support for FTPS, SFTP, and SSH connections has been significantly improved. For FTPS connections (FTP over SSL or TLS), EditPad now prompts whether you want to accept the server’s SSL certificate. You can choose to reject the certificate, to accept it once, to always accept this particular certificate for this particular server, or to always accept certificates that match the server address and aren’t expired. If the server presents a certificate that does not match the address you’re using to connect to it, or if the certificate has expired, then EditPad will always prompt for it, even if you had chosen to always accept it before it expired.
For SSH and SFTP connections there is a similar prompt that asks whether you want to accept the server’s public key. Since SSH keys do not identify the server, EditPad can only display the key’s fingerprint. Your choices are to reject the key, accept it once, or always accept it for that server.
EditPad Pro now supports SSH and SFTP connections using a private key file instead of a password. In the “Connect to FTP Server” dialog, click the (...) button next to the new “private key” setting to access EditPad’s private key storage. Click the Import button to import a private key. The first time you do this you will be prompted for a password (and again to avoid typos). This password is used to encrypt all the keys in EditPad’s private key storage. After importing the key, click the Select button to select that key and close the key storage dialog.
You can connect to another server using the same key simply by selecting the key in the “private key” drop-down list in the FTP connection dialog. You can connect to another server using a different key by clicking the (...) button and importing another key.
EditPad will ask for the private key storage password once per EditPad session at the moment where it needs to encrypt a key you’re importing or decrypt a key you need to connect to a server. The keys are stored with the rest of EditPad’s settings, which is in %APPDATA%\JGsoft\EditPad Pro 7 for normal installs, and EditPad’s installation folder for portable installs. Fingerprints of server certificates and keys that you have chosen to always accept are stored in the EditPadPro7.ini file.
One issue we’re aware of is that private keys generated by ssh-keygen can only be imported if they are not protected with a passphrase. You can run ssh-keygen with the -p command line argument to (temporarily) remove the passphrase from your private key and then import it into EditPad.
EditPad now supports CTR encryption mode and DH group 14 key exchange for SSH/SFTP connections. If previous releases failed to connect to your SSH/SFTP server saying that an encryption algorithm could not be agreed on, then this will most likely be resolved with version 7.4.0.
A bunch of bugs were also fixed. The version history has the details.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.4.0 version history
EditPad Pro can handle files of any size, including files larger than 4 GB. Files larger than the huge file threshold you specify in Options|Preferences|Open Files are swapped out to disk, so they can be edited with minimal memory usage. You can increase this threshold to 10% of your PC’s RAM. If you edit the files, then edited parts of the file are kept in memory until you save the file. So with lots of large files open, a high threshold for swappings files to disk, or making changes throughout a huge file, EditPad’s memory usage can quickly grow beyond 4 GB. If a single EditPad Pro instance actually ends up using more than 4 GB of RAM then random crashes could occur in the 64-bit builds of EditPad Pro 7.1.0 through 7.3.7 due to a bug in the user interface library. These crashes did not corrupt any files, but would cause you to lose any unsaved changes. If you want to be able to keep large numbers of large files open in EditPad Pro, you should upgrade to version 7.3.8 immediately.
Making lots of changes, like a Replace All command replacing millions of search matches, can cause EditPad’s undo history to use a lot of memory. You can configure the amount of memory that the undo history can use per file and for all open files in Options|Preferences|System. Previously, setting one of those limits above 2 GB caused “list index out of bounds” and “access violation” errors while editing. Setting the limit this high is only possible when using 64-bit EditPad Pro on a PC with lots of RAM.
You can change the colors used by EditPad’s editor by customizing the color palettes that you can select for each file type in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax. Clicking the color buttons shows a color picker. This color picker now scales correctly on high DPI systems (high resolution monitors). The button for the background color is now hidden when “Editor: Folding icons” is selected in the list, as this item does not have a background color. The default color for bookmarks and folding icons is now the margin color rather than the plain text color.
With View|Split Editor you can see two parts of the same file. The submenu of that menu item allows you to select whether the scrolling of the two views should be linked or independent. When it is independent, adding or deleting lines in one part of the file does not scroll the other part of the file. Previously, when word wrap was off, the other part would scroll by the number of lines that were added or removed.
EditPad 7.3.7 fixed some issues with minimizing EditPad’s window on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. Unfortunately, these fixes introduced a new bug. Minimizing EditPad when the option to hide the taskbar button is turned on in Options|Preferences|System left a non-functional taskbar button instead of hiding it. This bug has now been fixed, while retaining the fixes made in 7.3.7.
If you accidentally double-click the same text file twice in Windows Explorer while EditPad is not yet running, you will now always get one EditPad instance with one tab for that file. Previously, depending on the timing of the second double-click, you could end up with one EditPad instance with two tabs for the same file.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.3.8 version history
Windows 7 introduced a new semi-maximized window state that you can enter by dragging the top or bottom edge of a window to the edge of your monitor, or by pressing Windows+Arrow Left/Right on the keyboard. This changed the way maximized windows are handled. This is unchanged in Windows 8 and 8.1. EditPad Pro has supported this semi-maximized state since version 6.6.2, released way back in 2010 when Windows 7 was released. But this brought some complications. Maximizing EditPad, minimizing it, and then restoring it caused EditPad to come back unmaximized. This was solved in version 7.0.5. But this fix was a little too persistent. If EditPad Pro was minimized from its maximized state, then for the remainder of the EditPad session, restoring EditPad from its minimized state would maximize it, even if you unmaximized it. It would also cause EditPad to maximize itself when using any menu item like FIle|New that can be accessed by right-clicking its icon next to the system clock, even when that icon has been disabled. This has been fixed now, while retaining all the earlier fixes.
EditPad’s spell checker did not show any correctly spelled suggestions when using the Romanian spell check dictionary. The problem was not with the dictionary but with EditPad itself, starting with version 7.0.0. It only occurred with the Romanian dictionary because that dictionary uses a different code page to support the letters S and T with comma below.
Version 7.3.6 fixed most of the issues with the command in the Mark menu when using project-wide bookmarks. This release fixes one remaining issue. The Go to Next/Previous Bookmark commands now correctly jump to the next/previous file that actually has bookmarks when there are no further bookmarks in the active file, rather than always activating the file after/before the active file.
You can change the colors used by EditPad’s editor by customizing the color palettes that you can select for each file type in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax. When you click the button to show the color picker, and then click the More button to show the RGB edit boxes, hovering the mouse over any color in the color picker now indicates the RGB values of that color in the edit boxes.
EditPad Pro ships with both full-featured and line-based (“fast”) syntax coloring schemes for the most popular SQL dialects. You can select these in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax. The full-featured schemes now apply bracket matching to the BEGIN and END keywords, so the commands in the Edit and Go menu that work on brackets now also work on BEGIN and END keywords when writing SQL code.
EditPad has supported proper editing of Unicode text files since version 6.0.0, including word wrapping on all Unicode spaces and dashes, except non-breakable ones. Version 6.5.0 and later also allow word wrapping before and after ideographs, as they are usually written as long strings without spaces. Unfortunately, there was a bug in which characters EditPad would treat as ideographs for word wrapping. This allowed word wrap at certain characters where it should not, such as the non-breaking hyphen. This has now been fixed.
Project|Open Folder and Search|Find On Disk now add the regular expression that you can use as a file mask to the drop-down list, so you can quickly reselect it in the future.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.3.7 version history
This release fixes a number of bugs. These release notes explain the most important fixes. The version history has the complete list.
If you turned on incremental search, entered a search term, and then backspaced the entire search term, then after that anything you do that wants to show a progress meter would either not show a progress meter or permanently show a stuck progress meter. The latter scenario made it impossible to interact with EditPad.
The Go to Next/Previous Bookmark, Remove All Bookmarks, and Set Any Bookmark menu items all had issues when the option to use project-wide bookmarks was turned on. Using project-wide bookmarks gives you 10 numbered bookmarks per project, rather than 10 numbered bookmarks per file. You can have as many numberless bookmarks per file as you want, regardless of whether bookmarks are numbered per file or per project.
Sorting a file alphabetically when it was already in alphabetic order and contained duplicate lines caused EditPad to mark the file as modified, even though its contents hadn’t changed. while this didn’t cause any problems with the file, it could be confusing.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.3.6 release notes
This release fixes a rare but serious bug that was introduced in version 7.3.2 and is also present in versions 7.3.3 and 7.3.4. When using the Search|Replace All command on a large file with a regular expression and a replacement string that is longer than the regular expression matches then very occasionally the replacements would not be made correctly. The problem only occurs in very specific circumstances internal to EditPad’s memory management. Most of our users were never really affected by this. Only one user actually reported the bug. But what makes the issue serious is that you might not notice it when it happens. If you have EditPad replace a million matches in a huge file and a dozen of those were made incorrectly then you may not notice the incorrect replacements. And if you did the only solution would be to reload the file from disk, discarding any changes since the last save. So anyone using EditPad 7.3.2, 7.3.3, or 7.3.4 should upgrade to 7.3.5 immediately. Version 7.3.5 retains the performance improvements made in version 7.3.2.
The Search|Multi-Line Search Panel menu item allows you to toggle between using the Search toolbar on its own with drop-down lists for the search term and replacement versus using the full search panel with multi-line edit controls. Previously, the drop-down lists would show the entire list of recent search terms, which could be unwieldy if you recently used the full search panel to search for large blocks of text. Now, the drop-down lists only show search terms that do not span across lines. The search history does retain multi-line search terms as in the past. Those history items will reappear when switching back to the full search panel and right-clicking the Search or Replace box.
When you have many files open, the Files Panel that you can open via the View menu is often easier to work with than the row of tabs. If you usually work with many files, you can even disable the tabs in Options|Preferences|Tabs to save screen space. But in previous EditPad Pro releases, doing that would make EditPad’s window caption the only way to see which file is active. Now, the Files Panel underlines the active project and active file, so you can see which project and which file are active even when you select other files or projects in the Files Panel.
The Share Collections button on the Clip Collection toolbar allows you to share clip collections with other EditPad and AceText users. This feature has been broken for some time due to a combination of problems on the server that manages the shared clip collections and a bug in EditPad itself. The issues on the server have been fixed, allowing all EditPad 7.x.x releases to download shared collections once again. If you want to upload a collection of your own, you should upgrade to EditPad 7.3.5 first as previous releases don’t always do the upload correctly.
The quickest way to get technical support for EditPad Pro is via the user forum that’s built right into EditPad itself. Just select Help|Forum in the menu to connect. To speed up connection times, EditPad keeps a cache of conversations that it has previously downloaded. Ironically, there was a performance issue with writing this cache, which could cause a delay of many seconds when closing the forum window on slower PCs. This issue has now been resolved. EditPad’s forum window should now close pretty much instantaneously, while retaining the benefits of the cache that allow EditPad to quickly connect to the forum server by only requesting new messages.
Version 7.3.3 gave EditPad the ability to handle Unicode signatures or byte order markers in output received from tools. Unfortunately, while implementing that, we broke the option to preserve the presence or absence of the byte order marker in existing files. You can specify this in Options|Configure File Types|Encoding. EditPad Pro 7.3.3 only used the option “write a byte order marker at the start of Unicode files” to determine whether files would be saved with or without a BOM. The status bar indicator also incorrectly indicated whether a BOM would be written when the file is saved instead of indicating whether the file presently has a BOM. Version 7.3.4 restores the correct behavior from version 7.3.2 and prior, once again preserving the BOM if you enabled that option, and indicating in the status bar whether the file presently has a BOM. Version 7.3.4 also keeps the improved handling of Unicode tools from version 7.3.3.
The ASP.NET syntax coloring schemes included with previous EditPad Pro 7.x.x releases contained a regular expression that exhibits catastrophic backtracking. This crippled EditPad’s performance, causing it to take several seconds to respond to each keystroke. Version 7.3.4 includes improved ASP.NET syntax coloring schemes that do not have this problem. On top of that, EditPad Pro 7.3.4 automatically disables syntax coloring for the active file when catastrophic backtracking occurs in the syntax coloring scheme, so you can continue to edit the file without interruption. This prevents the same problem from happening with custom syntax coloring schemes that have regexes that backtrack catastrophically.
If you double-click on an FTP URL like ftp://user:pwd@hostname:21 that does not have a forward slash after the host name or the port number then the FTP panel will now correctly interpret the different parts of the URL instead of taking the whole URL as the server name.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.3.4 version history
Version 7.3.2 improved the performance of EditPad’s search-and-replace. Unfortunately it also introduced one new bug. A search-and-replace using a regular expression and a blank replacement text would replace the matches the most recent non-blank replacement text instead of deleting the matches. This has now been fixed, while keeping all the performance improvements.
Ultra-high resolution monitors and laptops are becoming more popular. To keep text legible on such screens, Windows needs to be configured with a large font scaling factor. Windows 8.1 even sets this up automatically. EditPad 7.0.0 brought some important improvements that make EditPad correctly size itself and look crisp on high resolution screens. Version 7.3.3 fixes a couple of issues. With very high scaling factors (e.g. 200% font scaling on a 10” full HD screen), EditPad enforced a minimum size that was larger than the screen, making it impossible to correctly size and position the window. EditPad now enforces a much smaller minimum size, even on standard resolution monitors. If you want EditPad to be tiny, close all side panels and hide the main menu and all toolbars except the main toolbar. The captions and tabs of the side panels used excessively large fonts on high DPI systems. This has been fixed by making them use the font face and size specified one the Panels tab in the Preferences.
When you add a tool to EditPad Pro’s Tools menu, you can tell EditPad Pro to capture the tool’s standard output and/or standard error into a new tab or into the message panel. When EditPad Pro receives the first chunk of output, it now checks whether the output starts with a Unicode signature or byte order marker. If it does, the signature is stripped from the output and the remainder is interpreted as Unicode, similar to what EditPad does when you open a file that has a Unicode signature. Applications designed to be run on the Windows command prompt normally don’t emit Unicode signatures (or use Unicode at all), because the Windows command prompt does not recognize them. But if you’re writing a script specifically for use with EditPad, then making the script print a Unicode signature is now a very reliable way of making sure EditPad correctly interprets your script’s output as Unicode.
This release fixes two serious bugs. Copying more than 16 bytes from the hex section and pasting into a text mode tab that does not use CRLF line breaks caused EditPad to hang. If you attempted to use a regex with a syntax error on the Search panel, or if you used Search|Fold All Matches a second time to unfold previously folded search matches, then after that anything you do that wants to show a progress meter would either not show a progress meter or permanently show a stuck progress meter. The latter scenario made it impossible to interact with EditPad.
The performance of EditPad’s Search panel has been further improved. A search-and-replace that makes a large number of replacements throughout the entire file (such as making a change on every line in the file) is now faster and uses less memory. This will be particularly noticeable when working with very large files.
In Options|Preferences|Tabs, you can choose that Ctrl+Tab should switch between files in the order that you most recently viewed them. This order is now preserved for each project when you switch between projects.
OpenSSL was in the news in recent months due to security vulnerabilities, including the infamous Heartbleed bug. EditPad Pro has never included a version of OpenSSL that was affected by this bug. EditPad Pro never listens for incoming connections. It only establishes connections to servers that you explicitly tell it to connect to. So even if EditPad Pro had been vulnerable, it could only have affected you if you chose to use EditPad to connect to a compromised or malicious server.
EditPad Pro uses OpenSSL if you tell it to connect to an FTP server with SSL or TLS encryption, but not for SFTP or SSH encryption. It also uses OpenSSL if you use the File|Mail command and selected SSL or TLS encryption in Options|Preferences|Mail. If you do not use these features, then EditPad Pro does not use OpenSSL at all. If you don’t want to have OpenSSL on your system, you can delete the files libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll from EditPad Pro’s installation folder. EditPad Pro runs just fine without these DLLs. Deleting them only disables EditPad’s ability to connect to servers that use SSL or TLS encryption. EditPad Pro 7.3.2 ships with version 1.0.1h of OpenSSL.
This release also fixes a bunch of minor bugs. The version history has the complete list. One of these issues affected file navigation schemes. The file navigation scheme editor has been updated to include the same fix.
This release brings a number of bug fixes. Many of them are corner case issues. The version history has the complete list.
This release also brings a couple of important performance enhancements to EditPad’s Search panel. Regular expressions in the form of (?<=lookbehind).* performed very poorly when the “dot matches line breaks” option was off. Now they’re just as fast with “dot matches line breaks” turned off as with the option turned on. Search|Replace All and Search|Cut Matches were extremely slow when the Line by Line search option was turned on. Now they’re almost as fast with Line by Line turned on as with the option turned off.
Via Options|Text Layout you can select and edit a text layout for editing complex scripts. Complex scripts are scripts that are not written exclusively from left to right, which includes Arabic, Hebrew, and the various Indic scripts. Since such scripts often require specific fonts, EditPad’s text layouts for complex scripts allow you to specify fallback fonts. These fonts are used to display characters that the main font does not support. This font fallback mechanism can be very useful even when your text is written strictly from left-to-right. Your preferred font for English text may have limited support for other scripts or special characters like mathematical symbols. This is true for many fonts favored by programmers such as Courier New and Vera Sans Mono. By using the left-to-right complex script text layout, you can specify exactly which fonts that EditPad should use for words in other scripts or math symbols that you’re mixing with your English text. New in version 7.3.0 is that EditPad applies the fallback fonts in a much more granular fashion, allowing most characters to be displayed with the correct font.
The file navigation schemes for JavaScript and XML have been improved. The JavaScript scheme now correctly handles lists of variables declared using a single var keyword. The XML scheme now correctly handles XML files that use non-ASCII XML tags or attributes. The same improvement was made to the syntax coloring schemes for XML.
Two improvements were made to EditPad’s hexadecimal mode. When making a selection with the mouse, you can now select the last byte on a row by moving the mouse pointer to the end of the row. Moving it to the start of the next row, as you previously had to do, still works. EditPad’s performance when pasting a large block of bytes in hexadecimal mode was improved dramatically. Pasting a whole gigabyte now takes a second instead of a minute. (Assuming you’re running 64-bit Windows with plenty of RAM, of course.)
The best way to get technical support for EditPad is via its built-in forum. You can access it by selecting Help|Forum in the menu in EditPad. Previously, EditPad could connect to the Internet (and to the forum) if your PC had a direct internet connection or if it could connect through an HTTP proxy that either required no authentication or allowed basic authentication. You can configure the proxy server via the Proxy button on the login screen to the forum. Now EditPad supports additional authentication methods for HTTP proxies. It will automatically negotiate a supported authentication method with the proxy server, so there’s no need to select the authentication method when you configure your HTTP proxy in EditPad. EditPad can now also connect to the Internet via proxy servers using versions 4, 4A, or 5 of the SOCKS protocol. You’ll need to select the correct version when configuring your SOCKS proxy in EditPad. If your SOCKS proxy needs a password, then it will be running SOCKS version 5.
Version 7.3.0 also fixes nearly two dozen corner case bugs. The version history has the complete list.
This release brings several fixes and improvements to EditPad’s features for searching for text. In the Search Preferences, you can enable an option to make double-clicking a shortcut for Search|Instant Highlight. Turning this on will no longer change the highlighting when you double-click something like an URL that has its own double-click action (opening the URL in your browser). You can still select Search|Instant Highlight in the menu if you do want to highlight something that has a double-click action. The Search Matches panel now uses the same tab size as the files that the matches were found in. If those files use different tab size settings, the settings from the first file with matches will be used.
In version 7.2.1 we introduced a new bug that caused search commands that process all matches like Replace All to show an access violation error after showing a proper error message when attempting to use an invalid regular expression. Version 7.2.3 fixes this, while keeping the otherwise improved handling of invalid regular expressions introduced in version 7.2.1.
Using the Fold menu, or by using automatic folding from a file navigation scheme, you can make large files easier to navigate by folding away the parts of the file you’re not working on. In previous versions of EditPad Pro, there were two specific situations in which folded text could result in erratic cursor movement or incorrect lines being displayed. Unfolding the text always made the issue go away.
EditPad Pro allows foldable ranges to be nested inside each other. It does not allow two ranges to start on the same line, but it does allow two ranges to end on the same line. Previous versions did not correctly handle multiple ranges ending on the same line when they were actually folded. This has been corrected.
When a foldable range is nested inside another range, it must be completely inside the other range. Previously, EditPad Pro did not check this, which allowed you to create interlocking ranges in which the inner range ends after the outer range. This caused EditPad to get confused when the inner range was folded. Now EditPad Pro prevents this situation. When you fold a new range inside an existing range, Editpad will force the new range to stop at the same line or a prior line as the existing range. When you fold a new range before an existing range, the new range must stop at a line prior to the line the existing range starts on.
The Fold All, Unfold All, and Toggle All Folds commands now have improved cursor handling. After folding or unfolding, they will scroll the editor in order to keep the line with the cursor at the same vertical position, instead of putting it at the bottom of the editor when scrolling is required to keep the cursor visible. This will make it a bit easier to keep track of where you are in your file, as folding or unfolding everything may drastically change the number of visible lines.
The file navigation scheme for Delphi source code has been improved. It now makes nested begin..end blocks foldable if you turn on detailed folding in Options|Configure File Types|Navigation for the Delphi file type. It now supports records that have methods and properties. Records now have their own “Records” node in the tree, rather than being added under “Types” where simple types are added.
The syntax coloring scheme for Python now correctly handles escaped triple quotes in triple-quoted strings.
A bunch of other minor bugs were also fixed. The version history has the complete list.
Previous 7.x.x releases caused seemingly arbitrary division by zero errors on certain PCs in certain circumstances when opening files, closing EditPad, and/or changing the font size. Version 7.2.2 eliminates all such errors.
When using Project|Open Folder to open files from a folder, you can specify a regular expression. Only files with names that (partially) match that regular expression will be opened. If that regular expression has a syntax error, you will now get a proper error message, instead of an access violation.
The Search|Find on Disk command allows you to choose the files that will be searched through in the same way as you can choose the files that will be opened by Project|Open Folder. If you specify a regular expression on the Find on Disk dialog, only files with names that (partially) match that regular expression will be searched through. If that regular expression has a syntax error, you will now get a proper error message, instead of an access violation. The regular expression that you specify in the Find on Disk dialog is not the one that will be used to search through the contents of the files. The text or regular expression you specify on the Search panel in EditPad Pro’s main window (before you select Search|Find on Disk in the menu) is what EditPad Pro will use to search through the files.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.2.2 version history
This release brings a few minor fixes and improvements. The Search panel now handles invalid regular expressions a bit more gracefully. Block|Fill Columns no longer causes an access violation when used on a very large selection that don’t allow all the changes to fit in the memory reserved for the undo history. Fold|Fold to create a new folding range no longer includes the line that the cursor is on if the cursor is at the start of the line and at the bottom of the selection.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.2.1 version history
EditPad Pro is now fully compatible with Windows 8. We only had to fix a few minor issues in the installer, and one issue in EditPad Pro itself that caused drop-down lists on toolbars to display their drop-down arrows incorrectly.
Most Windows applications disable the Cut and Copy commands when nothing is selected. EditPad Pro, however, keeps these commands enabled and cuts or copies the active line when nothing is selected. The benefit is that this way you can quickly copy or move lines around, without having to select them. But it does mean that the contents of the clipboard will be replaced if you accidentally hit Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C without making a selection. In Options|Preferences|Editor there is a new option “Copy active line when nothing is selected”. It is on by default, enabling EditPad’s special behavior. You can turn it off to make EditPad disable the Cut and Copy commands like other Windows applications do. Also, if you leave this option on, pressing Ctrl+X or Ctrl+C while the cursor is on an empty line no longer erases the clipboard.
Several improvements were also made. Deleting (large) rectangular selections is now much faster. If you overwrite a file that is already open while using File|Save As, then the overwritten file is now closed automatically, to prevent the same file being open in two tabs. Folding ranges nested 4 levels or deeper now indicate the end of the range with a little horizontal line to the right of the 3rd vertical line. When the editor is split and both halves scroll independently then inserting or deleting lines in one half should automatically scroll the other half if it shows lines after the inserted or deleted lines so that the other half continues to show the same text.
A bunch of minor bugs were also fixed. The version history has the complete list.
This release brings a large number of minor bug fixes and improvements. The version history has the complete list. These release notes highlight the most important improvements.
EditPad 6 and prior had a large Search panel with multi-line Search and Replace boxes. EditPad 7.0.0 introduced new compact Search toolbar with small Search and Replace drop-down lists. The Toggle Search Panel item in the Search menu allowed you to switch between the two. This menu item has been renamed to Multi-Line Search Panel to make it clearer what this menu item does: open or close the large Search panel with multi-line Search and Replace boxes. The actual function of the menu item is unchanged. What is also unchanged is that if you only ever want to use the large search panel (as in EditPad 6 and before), you can disable the Search toolbar by first using Search|Multi-Line Search Panel to close the large search panel (if it is visible), and then right-click on any toolbar and select Search to hide the Search toolbar. Next time you press Ctrl+F, the large Search panel will appear.
EditPad 7.1.2 no longer loads and saves its toolbar configuration if you have never customized the toolbars. This noticeably reduces the time it takes for EditPad to start and shut down, particularly on slower computers. If you have used a previous EditPad 7.x.x release, or if you have customized the toolbars, then you can use the View|Restore Default Layout command to make EditPad 7.1.2 forget its toolbar customization and benefit from the faster startup and shutdown.
EditPad Pro 7.1.2 includes a significantly improved syntax coloring scheme and a brand new file navigation scheme for Tcl. The default list of file types in a clean install of EditPad Pro 7.1.2 also includes a file type for Tcl. If you’re upgrading from a previous 7.x.x release, the upgrade will not change your list of file types, but will install the new syntax coloring and file navigation schemes. So you can add a new file type for Tcl by yourself via Options|Configure File Types and select the new schemes for it.
The Set Bookmark N items in the Mark menu now change their captions to more accurately reflect what will happen. The actual behavior is unchanged from previous versions. The caption will be changed to Remove Bookmark N if the bookmark already exists on the line the cursor is on, as setting a bookmark on the same line removes it. The caption will be changed to Move Bookmark N if the bookmark already exists on another line. The Set Bookmark N caption is still used if the bookmark has not yet been placed anywhere.
The huge files threshold in Options|Preferences|Open Files now has an upper limit of 10% of the amount of RAM on your PC rather than a fixed 200 MB limit when running the 64-bit version of EditPad Pro on a PC with more than 2 GB of RAM. This allows larger files to be read into memory entirely rather than being swapped out to disk. The huge files threshold also affects other things, such as whether EditPad Pro will use the “fast” syntax coloring scheme you selected in Options|Preferences|Configure File Types. Take your computer’s speed as well as the amount of available RAM into account when setting the huge files threshold. 50 MB is a good trade-off on modern PCs.
While EditPad Lite is only officially supported on Windows, it runs well enough on Linux using WINE. Version 7.1.0 failed to run under WINE, crashing at startup. Version 7.1.1 fixes this. Double-clicking files on the Files Panel no longer causes an access violation when running under WINE.
A few other bugs were also fixed. A significant one was that when searching though the files on disk took long enough for a progress meter to appear, EditPad failed to close the progress meter after searching through all the files, making further interaction with EditPad impossible.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.1.1 version history
EditPad Pro’s installer now includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of EditPad Pro. It will automatically install the correct version depending on whether you’re running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows. Because this is a free minor update, the installer will automatically use the same installation folder. If you previously installed a previous version of EditPad Pro under c:\Program Files (x86)\ on 64-bit Windows, then the EditPad Pro 7.1.0 installer will install the 64-bit version into the same folder under c:\Program Files (x86)\. Though this folder is normally used for 32-bit applications, there is absolutely no problem with installing 64-bit software into it. You can change the installation folder via Advanced Options Installation, but that will break any shortcuts and file associations you created with EditPad Pro. For new installations on 64-bit Windows, the installer will default to c:\Program Files\.
The main benefit of having a native 64-bit version of EditPad Pro is that it can now use all of the available RAM in your PC, rather than being limited to 3 GB. This allows you to keep more large files open at the same time. Depending on the amount of RAM your PC has, you will be able to set larger limits for the “huge files threshold” setting in Options|Preferences|Open Files. By reading files partially into memory, EditPad Pro can edit files that do not fit into your PC’s RAM.
The mechanism for docking side panels has changed. Previously panels were docked by dragging their caption bar or tab and then dragging them to the edge of another panel or EditPad itself. This was cumbersome because the edge area that the mouse needed to be dragged to was invisible. Starting with version 7.1.0, when you drag a panel by its caption bar or tab, squares will appear next to the 4 edges of EditPad’s window. Moving the mouse to one of those squares while dragging a panel docks it to the edge of EditPad’s window. While dragging over another panel, 5 squares appear in the middle of the panel. Moving the mouse to the center square docks the dragged panel into a tab container with the panel you’re dropping it onto. Moving the mouse to one of the 4 outer squares docks the panel side by side with the other panel.
EditPad’s main editor (where you edit your files) also acts as a location where you can dock panels. The center square is disabled because you put the main editor into a tab container (it already has tabs for files). The outer squares dock panels side by side with the main editor. If there are no panels docked at a particular edge, then there may appear no difference between docking a panel side by side with the main editor or docking it to the edge of EditPad itself. But there is a difference. You will notice it when you resize EditPad’s window. If a panel is docked to the edge of EditPad’s window, then resizing EditPad’s window does not change the size of that panel. But when you dock it side by side with the main editor, resizing EditPad’s window will also resize the docked panel in proportion to the space it shares with the main editor.
This release also brings a bunch of minor fixes and improvements. The version history has all the details.
The installer for the purchased version of EditPad Pro now allows you to create portable installations even when you don’t have administrator rights on the PC you’re running the installer on. You can create a portable install in any folder that you can write to, even if that folder is on a hard drive. Spell checker: Portable installs now always save downloaded spell check dictionaries to folder from which EditPad Pro is run. If there are no spell check dictionaries in that folder, portable installs will still use dictionaries that are installed on the host PC. But they will no longer save dictionaries on the host PC in that situation.
EditPad Pro’s editor has three right-click menus. One appears when you right-click on selected text. Another one appears when you right-click on text that is not selected (even if other text is selected). The third one appears when you right-click the left margin with line numbers, bookmarks, and folding icons. Version 7.0.9 is now a bit more logical in its choice of which context menu to show when you right-click. You can customize EditPad’s main context menus by right-clicking on any toolbar and selecting Customize. A temporary toolbar that holds the context menus appear, allowing you to customize them by dragging and dropping menu items.
EditPad Pro 7.0.0 brought a few major improvements to the FTP panel, most importantly support for every kind of secure FTP. It also introduced a few bugs that have now been fixed. Opening a project that contains FTP files when you aren’t connected to their FTP server now correctly reconnects to the server and downloads those files. Saving files stored on FTP now works correctly even if you aren’t connected to the FTP server or haven’t navigated to the folder containing the files.
EditPad Pro 7.0.0 also introduced the Edit|Insert Date and Time|Other Date and Time Format command that allows you to insert the current date and time in a custom format. Starting with version 7.0.9, when recording this command as part of a macro, the macro now also records the date and time format. When playing back the macro the current date and time will be inserted using the recorded format rather than prompting for the date and time format again. If you have a few date and time formats that you use often, you can record macros for them and assign keyboard shortcuts to those macros. Then you can use those date and time formats with a single key combination.
Several other bugs have been fixed. The cursor was sometimes positioned incorrectly while typing on a line that mixes bold and plain text and the font is not strictly monospaced (bold text is wider than plain text) (7.0.7 and 7.0.8 only). If a file had more than 9,999 lines then the width of the margin was sometimes inconsistent until you caused all visible lines to be repainted. Opening a file larger than 64K with line numbers turned on by default sometimes caused an access violation error. Printing failed if the font was not a TrueType font. If Search|Copy Search Matches took long enough for a progress meter to appear, EditPad failed to close the progress meter after copying the search matches, making further interaction with EditPad impossible.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.9 version history
The Search|Prepare to Search command (Ctrl+F) was broken in version 7.0.7. It did not show the full search panel when both the search toolbar and search panel were invisible. This has been fixed, while keeping the ability to put focus on the search drop-down list on toolbars other than the Search toolbar that was introduced in version 7.0.7.
When you open a very large file, EditPad will show you the top of the file immediately and allow you to edit it while it continues to scan the file for line breaks in the background. Version 7.0.8 fixes several bugs that could cause EditPad to crash if you worked with a file that was still being scanned for line breaks. If you enable the status bar indicators that show the number of (wrapped) lines in the file, those will now show “(counting)” instead of “---” while the active file is still being scanned for line breaks. A bug that caused word wrapping to fail on files larger than 2 GB, sometimes crashing EditPad Pro in the process, was also fixed.
If you’ve configured EditPad to save backup copies into a specific folder in Options|Preferences|Save Files, then milestone copies saved via the File History are now saved into that folder as well.
Two window placement bugs that occurred only on Windows 7 have been fixed. If you minimized EditPad, restored it and moved it to a different monitor, then some commands such as File|Open moved EditPad’s window back to the position it was previously restored to. If you placed EditPad on a monitor that has the taskbar at the left or at the top, minimized EditPad, and then restored it, EditPad’s position would be shifted by the width or height of the taskbar.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.8 version history
In EditPad’s built-in forum, pressing Ctrl+C while keyboard focus is on the list of conversations or messages now correctly copies an URL using the editpad: scheme. The message text editor now highlights URLs that use the editpad: scheme. Double-clicking such an URL opens the conversation or message it links to in EditPad’s forum. The cursor in the message text editor now also changes to reflect insert and overwrite mode if the text layout for the default file type uses different cursors for insert and overwrite mode. The submenu of the Attach button on the forum window now has two additional items that you can use to attach the entire clip collection that you have open on the Clip Collection panel, or just the clip that you have selected on the Clip Collection panel.
If you put the Search drop-down list on the main toolbar or a custom toolbar and hide the Search toolbar, the Search|Prepare to Search command (Ctrl+F) will now focus the Search drop-down list wherever you put it rather than showing the full search panel. Padding and other placeholder options are now correctly applied to placeholders for capturing groups such as %GROUP1:6L%. Replace All using a regular expression no longer results in incorrect line breaks. Folding a file on search matches is now much faster.
On the Explorer panel, the Set Home Folder is now always enabled. When a file is selected, the folder containing that file is set as the home folder. When nothing is selected, the button itself does nothing, but its drop-down menu will let you set recently used home folders. Selecting a favorite folder now scrolls the tree on the Explorer panel to make the selected folder visible.
Tool command lines that include environment variables are now processed correctly. If the settings for a tool use the option to make EditPad open the temporary file saved by the tool, then that file is no longer added to the File|Open submenu when you close it. This keeps the File|Open submenu from being cluttered with temporary files.
The syntax coloring scheme for CSS files was enhanced to properly support @media. The Perl file navigation scheme now correctly handles braces in special situations such as split(/}/).
The keyboard indicator on the status bar now correctly indicates the first key of a two-stage key combination.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.7 version history
This release fixes several issued we missed in version 7.0.5. Version 7.0.5 incorrectly interpreted UNC paths passed on the command line. This made it impossible to open files on network shares by double-clicking them in Windows Explorer. Command lines for external tools that started with a double quote were also not interpreted correctly. This made it impossible to run tools with spaces in the path to the executable or the file to be opened. When using the File Navigator, the cursor would move in the editor to the item selected in the File Navigator each time the File Navigator was updated to reflect changes made to the file.
Two older issues have also been fixed. Depending on how the default browser was configured, on some PCs the View|Browser command launched the file being edited rather than launching the default browser and passing it the file being edited. In some specific situations, searching and replacing with a regex across all open files caused search matches to be deleted rather than replaced.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.6 version history
EditPad 7.0.0 brought full support for right-to-left and bidirectional text editing. Version 7.0.5 improves on this to make EditPad’s behavior more like that of Notepad and other Windows applications. If any of the installed keyboard layouts is for a right-to-left language, then you can switch to a left-to-right text layout by holding down either Ctrl key while pressing and releasing the left hand Shift key. You can switch to a right-to-left text layout by holding down either Ctrl key while pressing and releasing the right hand Shift key. The text layouts are switched in the same way as the Options|Right-to-left menu item does. This menu item is still available.
As part of the text layout configuration in Options|Text Layout you can choose the shape of the text cursor. Previously, there was one cursor shape that uses a “flag” to indicate the direction of the text that the cursor was at. This kind of flag is still available as an option called “flag indicating text direction”. This allows you to distinguish between cursor positions that would otherwise be ambiguous. E.g. if you type the English “a” followed by the Hebrew “ש” then you’ll get “aש”. If you now click between the two characters to put the cursor between the two, they the cursor might be placed after the “a” or after “ש”. If the flag points to the right, it indicates left-to-right text, meaning newly typed text will be inserted after the “a”. If the flag points to the left, it indicates right-to-left text, meaning newly typed text will be inserted after the “ש”. Essentially, the “flag indicating text direction” option indicates the direction of previously typed text. Starting with version 7.0.5, the default bidirectional cursor gives the flag a different meaning. In the cursor customization, this option is called “flag indicating keyboard direction”. Just like the standard Windows text cursor in Notepad and many other applications, it indicates whether the currently selected keyboard layout is for a left-to-right language or a right-to-left language. Essentially, the “flag indicating keyboard direction” indicates the direction of new text you’re about to type.
Syntax coloring is now enabled in hexadecimal mode too if you selected a syntax coloring scheme in Options|Configure File Types for the active file type. By default, there is one file type for binary files that does not use syntax coloring. If you want to create syntax coloring schemes specifically for binary files, use the \xFF syntax in the regular expressions to match specific bytes. It’s important to use \x80 to \xFF to match bytes between 128 and 255. Literal characters and Unicode escapes may not work the way you might expect in hexadecimal mode as hexadecimal mode works on bytes rather than on characters.
The section for the default folder for projects on the Save Files tab in the Preferences now has an additional option to use the folder containing the active file. This option is only used if the option to use the folder containing the active project is off, or the active project has not yet been saved into a project file.
A whole bunch of minor bugs were fixed as well. The version history has the complete list.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.5 version history
The file picker shown by Extra|Compare Files and certain tool placeholders was broken in version 7.0.3. Version 7.0.4 restores its proper behavior.
EditPad Pro 7 has a new Split Editor command in the View menu that allows you to view two parts of the same file. When the view was split, previous 7.0.x releases occasionally displayed the file incorrectly or showed error messages when highlighting of matching brackets was enabled in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.4 version history
This release fixes a number of issues found in previous 7.0.x releases. EditPad 7.0.0 introduced full support for bidirectional editing of right-to-left scripts and complex scripts. Because bidirectional text is drawn in two passes, EditPad’s display sometimes flickered while you edited a file. Version 7.0.3 implements full double-buffering to eliminate all flicker. The right-to-left text layout now correctly spaces and displays tabs.
Version 7.0.2 made an improvement to the monospaced left-to-right only to space ideographs exactly twice as wide as all other characters (instead of squeezing them into the same width as Latin letters). Unfortunately, when tabs were used on the same line as ideographs, the text cursor was positioned incorrectly. Version 7.0.3 correctly handles tabs mixed with ideographs using the monospaced text layout.
The Block|Rectangular Selections command requires that the text is monospaced and that word wrap is off. It offers to change these settings for you. Previously, it would change the text layout and turn off word wrap even if the text was already monospaced but word wrap was on. Now, it will turn off word wrap without changing the text layout.
EditPad Pro 7.0.0 introduces bracket and tag matching and completion based on syntax coloring schemes. Version 7.0.3 tweaks the bracket/tag matching to handle tested brackets/tags more intelligently. It will now assume that an incorrectly nested bracket to the left of the cursor is actually a bracket that is missing its closing bracket. This way you can use Edit|Insert Matching Bracket to close an opening bracket that you’ve typed between other nested pairs of the same bracket.
On Windows 7, Options|Stay on Top caused EditPad 7 to stay on top of its own dialog boxes. Version 7.0.3 fixes this. When Options|Stay On Top is active, dialog boxes will stay on top of EditPad, and EditPad will still stay on top of all other applications.
Several improvements were made to the FTP panel. EditPad Pro 7 now distinguishes between symbolic links to files and to directories on an FTP server just like EditPad Pro 6 did. The Disconnect, Download, and Delete commands now use different accelerator keys. Reconnecting to a previously remembered SFTP server using keyboard-interactive authentication no longer fails with a “cannot focus disabled or invisible window” error.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.3 version history
EditPad Pro 7.0.0 introduced a new “text layout configuration” system that can be accessed via the Options menu and via the file type configuration. This allows you to configure how EditPad displays and edits text, with full support for complex scripts such as the various Indic scripts and right-to-left scripts such as Hebrew and Arabic. There’s also a text layout option for making left-to-right text strictly monospaced.
EditPad Pro 7.0.2 brings several fixes and improvements. Changes made to the text layout configuration via Options|Text Layout|Configure Text Layouts are now automatically saved, just like changes you make via Options|Configure File Types|Editor Options|Text Layout. The right-to-left text layout now correctly spaces and displays tabs. The monospaced left-to-right only now spaces ideographs exactly twice as wide as all other characters (instead of squeezing them into the same width as Latin letters), counting each ideograph as two columns, as long as “ASCII characters with full ideographic width” is turned off. If “ASCII characters with full ideographic width” is turned on, then the monospaced left-to-right text layout spaces all characters as wide as ideographs.
EditPad Pro 7.0.0 also introduced a new system of fully customizable menus and toolbars, with increased consistency between the menus and the toolbars. One obvious change is that menu items can now have submenus while still being commands themselves, just like toolbar buttons can have drop-down menus while still being commands themselves. As in EditPad 6, clicking the File|Open toolbar button shows the open file dialog, while using the drop-down menu allows you to reopen recently closed files. New is that the File|Open menu item now too has a submenu with recently closed files. Clicking the File|Open menu item directly shows the open file dialog, while using the submenu opens recent files. The result is a more compact main menu that can offer all the options without extra items for submenus. EditPad 6 had a separate File|Reopen submenu and an Options|Word Wrap menu item that lacked the additional wrapping options available through the toolbar button. EditPad 7 has a File|Open command with a submenu and an Options|Word Wrap command with a submenu that are exactly the same in the main menu and on the toolbar.
One disadvantage of the new system was that Alt+letter key combinations could not be used to access the submenus of menu items that are commands themselves. Only the arrow keys or mouse could be used. EditPad 7.0.0 and 7.0.1 would always execute the command. In EditPad 7.0.2, the state of the Alt key determines whether pressing the letter key will open the submenu or activate the command. To access the main menu, you have to press Alt+Letter like before. E.g. Alt+F opens the File menu. To open a submenu, continue to hold down the Alt key and press the underlined letter of the command with the submenu you want to open. For example: holding down Alt, pressing F, pressing O, releasing Alt will open the File|Open submenu with recent files. To directly execute a command that has a submenu, release the Alt key after opening the main menu, and then press the letter key for the command that you want to execute. For example: holding down Alt, pressing F, releasing Alt, pressing O will activate the File|Open command and show the open file dialog. Though it takes a lot of words to describe it, the system is simple and consistent: keep Alt held down to open menus; release Alt before executing commands. If a menu item does not have a submenu, then its command is executed regardless of the Alt key, also as it was in the past. If a menu item has a submenu but is not a command in itself, then its submenu is opened regardless of the Alt key, also as it was in the past.
One of the most popular feature requests from EditPad Pro 6 users was for secure FTP. EditPad Pro 7 delivers that in spades. Version 7.0.2 fixes some issues that we missed in the initial release. The FTP protocol uses separate connections to transfer commands (login, file names, etc.) and to transfer data (directory listings and files). An FTP connection is deemed secure when the command connection is encrypted even if the data connection is not encrypted. Some FTP servers require an unencrypted data connection, while others require an encrypted data connection. Some allow the client to choose. EditPad Pro 7.0.0 and 7.0.1 did not encrypt the data connection. Version 7.0.2 adds additional encryption options to the FTP connection window. If you previously selected an FTP encryption option other than “none” or “if available”, you’ll need to reselect the correct encryption option as the list of options has changed. If you choose “if available”, EditPad Pro 7.0.2 will request an encrypted data connection, and fall back to a clear (unencrypted) data connection if the server doesn’t support an encrypted data channel. For the “TLS” and “SSL” encryption options, you can now choose “fully encrypted” to encrypt both the command and data connections, or you can choose “files unencrypted” to use an encrypted command connection with a clear data connection. If the server supports TLS or SSL as you selected, but does not support “fully encrypted” or “files unencrypted”, then EditPad Pro will be able to connect to the server (and send your password securely while doing so), but EditPad will not be able to get directory listings or transfer files. If you select one of the “TLS” or “SSL” options and the server does not support TLS or SSL, EditPad Pro will not connect to the server at all, and won’t send your password. The SSH and SFTP options were also labeled (fully encrypted) for clarity. This does not represent a change in the way EditPad Pro connects to SSH servers. SSH always uses a single connection that always encrypts everything.
Project|Import File Listing now allows hyphens, spaces, and percentage signs in server and share names in UNC paths. If you use File|Reload from Disk on a file that no longer exists on disk, EditPad now prompts you to retry or cancel reloading, instead of automatically discarding the file’s contents. If you get this prompt because the file is on a removable drive or network drive that is no longer connected to your computer, you can reconnect the drive and then click the retry button. If the file was really deleted, you can cancel reloading and then click the Save button to recreate the file.
A bug in the built-in “clickable URLs” syntax coloring made it very slow. It was not slow enough to be noticeable with normal text files. But with extremely long lines and word wrap turned off, it slowed EditPad 7 down to a crawl. Version 7.0.2 fixes this, restoring its performance to EditPad 6 levels. If your files don’t contain URLs or you don’t care for them to be clickable, you can gain a tiny bit of performance by disabling it in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.2 version history
The release of EditPad Pro 7 has gone very smoothly. No serious issues have been reported. Version 7.0.1 brings a bunch of minor fixes and improvements. Many of the changes in 7.0.1 improve the new search system in EditPad 7 that allows you to use the search toolbar with or without the full search panel. The forum was also improved. The FTP panel now supports keyboard-interactive authentication when connecting to an SSH server. The option to clear history lists in Options|Preferences|System, which was mistakenly removed, has been reinstated. The regular expression colors can now be correctly configured in Options|Configure File Types|Colors and Syntax|Customize.
See the EditPad Pro 7.0.1 version history for a complete list of fixes and improvements.
EditPad Pro 7 is a major upgrade from previous releases with lots of new features and improvements. These release notes only explain the most significant ones. See the EditPad Pro 6 to 7 migration guide for features that aren’t new but that have been moved or redesigned in version 7.
When you start EditPad 7 you’ll immediately notice the the updated interface. All the toolbars and side panels can be docked and floated freely. You can customize the toolbars and even the main menu by right-clicking on them and selecting Customize. You can add, remove, and rearrange everything as you like. You can save and restore the arrangement of panels and toolbars with the Custom Layouts item at the bottom of the View menu. The new interface scales properly and looks crisp when using the high DPI settings in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. EditPad’s tabs have a new look and some new options. You can have an X button on each tab (off by default) and Ctrl+Tab can walk through the most recently accessed tabs (on by default) instead of walking from left to right.
The keyboard shortcut for the Redo command was changed to Ctrl+Y to be more in line with other Windows applications. The F5 shortcut is now assigned to Insert Date and Time as it was in EditPad 5 and prior instead of to Reload from Disk as it was in EditPad 6. You can change these and all other keyboard shortcuts via the Keyboard tab in the Preferences. When editing a file, you can now type various accented characters with Ctrl+punctuation key combinations. E.g. holding down Ctrl while pressing the apostrophe key and then typing an a inserts á. If your computer has a keyboard layout installed that uses the AltGr key to type special characters then EditPad removes any default Ctrl+Alt keyboard combinations that conflict with AltGr combinations.
EditPad 7 is a full Unicode application. You can use any mixture of any number of scripts anywhere in EditPad, including in file names. EditPad now supports bidirectional editing, so you can edit text written in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew or text written in a mixture of left-to-right and right-to-left scripts. You can configure text direction, cursor movement, fonts, and character spacing as part of the new text layout configuration system. You can assign two text layouts to each file type: one for left-to-right, and one for right-to-left. The Right-to-Left item in the Options menu toggles between the two.
EditPad 7 supports even more text encodings than EditPad 6. ASCII files that use \uFFFF or  or  to encode Unicode characters can now be edited directly, showing the actual Unicode characters in EditPad instead of the character escapes or XML entities. Other new encodings that can be edited directly are the EUC encodings for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the classic Mac code pages, and a range of legacy code pages: ArmSCII (Armenian), GEOSTD8 (Georgian), ISCII (Indic), ISIRI-3342 (Persian), Kamenický (Czech and Slovak), KZ-1048 (Kazach), Mazovia (Polish), MIK (Bulgarian), PTCP 154 (Cyrillic Asian), various Vietnamese code pages, and YUSCII. A few new encodings cannot be edited directly. Those encodings are ISO 2022 for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, HZ for Chinese, TSCII for Tamil, and UTF-7. EditPad converts those files to Unicode when you open them, and back to the target encoding when you save them. All encodings, including those that cannot be edited directly, can be set as the default encoding in the file type configuration. The convert menu also has commands for converting between \uFFFF, , and  and the characters they represent, or vice versa (for non-ASCII characters) regardless of the encoding the file uses.
EditPad Pro 7 can edit files that are larger than 2 GB, even on a 32-bit PC with less than 2 GB of RAM. The (theoretical) maximum sizes are now 9 billion GB (263 bytes) per file, 2 billion lines per file, and 2 billion bytes per line. In practice, on a modern PC, EditPad Pro 7 performs well with files well over 10 GB, millions of lines, and up to 100,000 characters per line.
The Project menu is now three times as long, reflecting the much improved project management in EditPad Pro 7. In EditPad Pro 6, opening and closing files automatically added them to and removed them from projects. EditPad Pro 7 does this too, until you turn on Managed Project in the Project menu. Then opening files does not add them to the project, and closing files does not remove them from the project. The Project menu has commands for adding files to managed projects with or without opening them, and for adding the files that you have already opened but not added to the project. You can close a file and remove it from the project, or remove all files that you have already closed but not removed. Projects can be exported to text files listing all the files in the project, and new projects can be created from text files with file listings.
The File Panel that lists all the projects, folders, and files you have open was improved significantly. Its performance has been improved dramatically. It no longer slows down EditPad even if you have many thousands of files open. You can toggle it between alphabetic order, tab order, and most recently edited order. You can show a flat list of files, folders relative to the project, or folders relative to the root drive. Files can be grouped by their file types. Folders can be listed before or after files. Closed files that are still part of projects can be shown or hidden.
The search toolbar can be shown and used for searching without showing the whole search panel. The search options are now toolbar buttons instead of checkboxes. They have Alt+Letter key combinations that take precedence over the main menu when the search toolbar or panel has keyboard focus. New options are a line-by-line option that searches lines separately and selects the whole line when a match is found. The invert option selects lines that have no search matches. The closed option searches through all files in a project, including files that are closed but still part of the project.
There are two new commands for cutting and copying all search matches to the clipboard. You can use this with or without the “line-by-line” and “all files” options. You can use placeholders such as %MATCH%, %MATCHN%, %LINE%, %LINEN%, and %FILE% with padding and arithmetic options in the search term and/or replacement text. They represent the search match, match numbers, matched lines, line numbers, and path or file names. Highlighting search matches is now done in the background just as syntax higlighting is, so it doesn’t slow EditPad down even when editing huge files. The new List All Matches command lists all search matches in the active file, the active project, or all projects, in a side panel with one line of context. The new Find on Disk command searches through a folder and opens the files containing matches, lists all matches in a side panel, or both.
When you copy and paste whole lines of text, including the final line break, then EditPad always inserts the line as a whole when pasting even when the cursor is in the middle of a line, rather than breaking up that line. Combined with the existing ability to cut and copy a single line without selecting anything, this allows you to easily move lines around without always having to put the cursor at the start of the line. EditPad Pro now places text on the clipboard as rich text. If you paste it into a word processor that supports RTF, the pasted text will have syntax coloring just like it does in EditPad. The RTF is only rendered when another application requests it, so this does not slow down copy and paste within EditPad. EditPad Pro now also copies folding to the clipboard. If you copy a block of lines and some of them are folded, those lines remain folded when you paste them back into EditPad.
Files are now added to the File|Open menu when you close them rather than when you open them. When you open a file (through the Reopen menu or otherwise) it is removed from the Reopen menu. This makes it much easier to reopen recently closed files. Files that were opened as part of a project are not added to the Reopen menu, as was the case in EditPad 6. The Project menu has its own Reopen menu that works the same as File|Open but lists projects instead of files.
EditPad’s FTP panel now supports SFTP and FTP over an encrypted SSL, TLS or SSH channel. You can keep a list of favorite files and folders for each FTP server. UNIX file permissions can be set. SMTP connections for sending email can now be encrypted using SSL or TLS.
In Options, Configure File Types you can now select multiple file types at the same time. Any changes you make are applied to all selected file types and all selected file types can be exported into a single .ini file. The color preferences were move to the file type configuration. You can create any number of color palettes, and select a different palette for each file type. You can make EditPad emulate the colors of the various other applications you use to edit different kinds of files.
In Tools, Configure Tools you can now select multiple tools at the same time. Any changes you make are applied to all tools. All selected tools can be exported into a single .ini file. EditPad Pro 7 has additional command line placeholders to pass the cursor position, the selected text, the word or line the cursor is on, or the file’s encoding on the tool’s command line. EditPad Pro 7 automatically substitutes environment variables in tool configurations. You can use custom placeholders that EditPad prompts for when you run the tool, including placeholders that show a file selection screen so you can pass multiple files on the tool’s command line. EditPad Pro can download web pages if you specify a URL as the command line and tell EditPad to capture standard output.
The options that determine the location of new EditPad instances created with the View, New Editor item have been moved from the preferences to a submenu of View, New Editor. If you select to split the running instance, it automatically reverts to its old size when the new instance is closed. This means you can quickly split EditPad in two to view two files side by side and go back to a single view, without having to manually arrange the two instances. If you want to have two views of the same file side by side, use the new Split Editor command in the View menu. It works just like the New Editor command, except that it splits the editor control within the running EditPad instance rather than starting a new instance. You can use the Split Editor and New Editor commands together to have two views each of multiple files at the same time. Both commands can be set to use your computer’s second monitor. Turn on View, Joint Scrolling to scroll the split views simultaneously. Turn on View, Other Editor Joint Scrolling to scroll all other EditPad instances in which you’ve enabled this option simultaneously with the active instance. This makes it easy to compare two parts of the same file or compare parts of different files, even when those parts don’t fit on your screen.
In hexadecimal mode you can now choose to show only the hexadecimal section or only the ASCII section. If you split the view, you can have the hexadecimal section in one view and the ASCII section in the other view. You can set a record length that determines how many bytes are shown on a line, rather than always showing the smallest multiple of 8 bytes that fits within the width of the editor.
The Insert Date and Time item in the Edit menu no longer uses a fixed date/time format. This setting was removed from the preferences screen. Instead, the menu item itself has a submenu that you can use to select a recently used date/time format, or specify a new one. If you click the Insert Date and Time item directly, the most recently used date/time format is inserted.
Bookmark icons are now displayed using the same font as the file you’re editing, so they don’t appear tiny on high resolution screens. Bookmarks are now associated with a character position rather than with a line so they can point to the middle or the end of a line instead of always pointing to the start of the line. Bookmarks now work in hexadecimal mode too. The Mark menu has commands for setting numberless bookmarks so you’re no longer restricted to 10 bookmarks per file. You can jump to these bookmarks with the new Next Bookmark and Previous Bookmark commands, which work with both numbered and numberless bookmarks.
Visualizing line breaks can now be done using generic paragraph markers like in EditPad Pro 6, or with specific line break symbols that indicate the style of each individual line break (CR, LF, CRLF). When highlighting search matches that span across lines, the line break symbols are now also highlighted to make it clear whether they are part of the search match or not.
The print preview now has checkboxes for printing with or without line numbers and with or without visualized spaces or line breaks. You can select a different color palette for the printout. The print preview remembers these settings separately for each file type.
If you run into any problems with EditPad Pro or just want to share your experiences, you can now connect with other EditPad Pro users on the EditPad Pro forum. It is built right into EditPad Pro itself. Simply select Forum in the Help menu. Your EditPad Pro license automatically gives you access to the forum. The forum is an official venue for technical support from Just Great Software. All questions will be answered by our staff, unless another EditPad Pro user provides a proper answer before we can get to it.
See also: EditPad Pro 7.0.0 version history