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EmEditor v21.3.0 released (including technical review)!

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Today, we are releasing EmEditor v21.3.

This new version supports very large files in the Free version as well as the Professional version. I believe this will benefit many students at school and home, who need free text editors supporting very large files. What I mean by “very large file support” is the ability to open very large files without loading all contents into the memory. EmEditor will read a file directly from the disk if the file size is larger than 300 MB by default. For a long time, the file loading has been optimized for speed by using multithreaded code using SIMD instruction sets. In other words, EmEditor Free opens very large files as fast as EmEditor Professional. Even though EmEditor Free supports very large files, the Large File Controller is available only on EmEditor Professional. Please see EmEditor Free for the updated comparison table.

The main feature of v21.3 is a new date/time support in Number Range expressions. The feature was requested by several customers including this question. For example, when you analyze server logs or sales reports containing dates/times, you often want to focus on a certain date/time range, and the new feature becomes useful in these situations. You could use regular expressions to search for a certain date range, but regular expressions often become complicated and slow. Thus, I’ve decided to support date ranges in existing Number Range expressions. When I developed this new feature, I wanted to make sure it would be optimized for speed. I also understand that you want to take full control over which date format you would want to match. Therefore, the date expression allows you to specify a date/time format surrounded by double quotation marks. For example:

[1/1/2021 , 31/1/2021 "d/M/yyyy" ]

matches “5/1/2021”.

You may combine multiple date formats with a pipe (“|”). For example:

[1/1/2021 , 31/1/2021 "d/M/yyyy|yyyy-MM-dd" ]

matches “5/1/2021” and “2021-01-05”, but it does NOT match “05/01/2021” or “2021-1-5”.

However, you can’t specify multiple date formats that conflict with each other. For example,

[1/1/2021 , 31/1/2021 "d/M/yyyy|M/d/yyyy" ]

is invalid because EmEditor can’t determine whether “5/1/2021” is the 1st of May or the 5th of January.

You may use almost any characters between year, month, and day like this:

[2021年1月1日 , 2021年1月31日 "yyyy年M月d日" ]

You may also use month names such as “January” or “Jan” by using “MMMM” or “MMM”, respectively, or use 24-hour time format: “HH:mm” or “HH:mm:ss”.

The new date range feature is available both in EmEditor Free and in EmEditor Professional.

Other new features include the ability to split a window into 3 panes! This feature has been requested for a long time. To split a window into 3 panes vertically or horizontally, select Split Vertically or Split Horizontally on the Window menu twice. This new feature is included in EmEditor Free and EmEditor Professional.

A customer wanted to move the current cell selection to the right when you press the ENTER key while in the CSV Cell Selection mode in EmEditor Professional. Previously, EmEditor can only set the focus into the Cell toolbar when you press ENTER. The new version allows the ENTER key customization, and introduces 4 new commands including the Next Cell (Cell Selection Mode Only) command. Thus, you can assign the ENTER key as the Next Cell (Cell Selection Mode Only) command.

A customer requested the ability to change the font size used in dialog boxes. While it is not easy to change the font name, it is relatively easy to change the font size. So, the new version allows you to change the font size in the Window page of the Customize dialog box. Another customer using the Chinese UI requested the ability to change the font face name. EmEditor’s dialog boxes use MS Shell Dlg, which is automatically substituted with an appropriate system font in each language of Windows. The font substitutes are defined in the Registry key: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes. The issue is that this substitution table is old. I’ve learned that the old SimSun font was used in Simplified Chinese Windows by default, but it isn’t easy to read. While modern fonts like Microsoft YaHei are used in Windows and even recommended by Microsoft, the font substitution table still points to the old font, which is not updated even now. I thought that Microsoft forgot to update the font substitution table, but maybe they worry about compatibility issues with older apps, so they intentionally didn’t update it. We have decided to hard-code Microsoft YaHei for Simplified Chinese, and Microsoft JhengHei for Traditional Chinese. We have not changed the other language UI yet but will test the other languages in beta versions for the next version. We will use Meiryo UI for Japanese, Malgun Gothic for Korean, and Segoe UI for other languages. We will release beta versions soon, so please try the new beta versions with the new dialog boxes when they become available, and let us know if you like the new look and feel.

Latest updates of Windows 11 include bug fixes that I have previously mentioned. I have tested EmEditor on Windows 11 thoroughly, and I don’t see any issues with EmEditor on Windows 11 anymore except that some plug-in dialog boxes don’t look good on the Very Dark mode. The dark mode is still undocumented for desktop apps, and I am still looking into the issue. Unless you use the Very Dark option of EmEditor, there are no issues with EmEditor on Windows 11.

Finally, I hope you like EmEditor, whether you use the Professional or Free version. Please contact us or write in forums if you have any questions, feature requests, or any ideas in the future. I also welcome you to write a review by selecting the Write a Review command on the Help menu, because I read them periodically. (You might need to download the Store App version before you are able to write a review.)

Thank you for using EmEditor!
— Yutaka Emura

Please see EmEditor v21.3 New Features for details and screenshots.

This release also includes following bug/issue fix:

  • Fixed visual issues in CSV mode.
  • Fixed a pre-v21.2 bug where #async = “off” did not work without spaces.
  • Fixed a potential issue after asynchronous macro errors.
  • Fixed an issue with proportional fonts where clicking on the right edge of a wide character might slip to the right side of the next narrow character.
  • Fixed an issue where the keyboard focus moved to the main window after Find in Files even if the Close when Finished option is clear.
  • Fixed a bug where DirectWrite was not off by default on Windows 7.
  • Fixed a pre-v21.2 bug where the Move/Copy Column(s) command did not work correctly under a certain condition.
  • Fixed a pre-v21.2 issue where selecting a column without headings in a CSV document and clicking the Select All button in the Find dialog box might have searched the headings.
  • Fixed customer-reported issues (1).

If you use the Desktop Installer version, you can select Check for Updates on the Help to download the newest version. If this method fails, please download the newest version, and run the downloaded installer. If you use the Desktop portable version, you can go to the Download page to download the newest version. The Store App versions can be updated through Microsoft Store (64-bit or 32-bit) after a few days. If you use winget, you can type “winget install emeditor” to install the latest version of EmEditor (64-bit or 32-bit detected automatically).

EmEditor v21.2.0 released (including technical review)!

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Today, we are releasing EmEditor v21.2.

Some customer asked me to write a technical review on major releases, and I thought it’s good idea. Many customer interactions and reasons often exist behind all new features, and I would like to share those behind the scenes stories with you, which might not fit in formal release notes.

First of all, I think many people would welcome the fact that this new version (v21.2) includes many new features for the Free version (EmEditor Free). In the past, my focus was updating the product for paid customers. However, more free text editors become available these days, and I want more users use EmEditor as an alternative to other free text editors. Some users wrote not-so-good reviews just because the Free version lacks many features that were available only for the Pro version. The new Free version features on v21.2 include Bookmarks, Markers, Compare files (with default options only), Spelling, Numbering, Full screen view, Workspaces, Macros (Record and Run only, no scriptable macros), Outline, Start window, and many options in configuration properties. In the past, some users complain that the process to downgrade from Pro to Free is confusing. In recent versions, the Downgrade and Upgrade commands exist on the Help menu, but the default was still Pro version. There is no default on v21.2 anymore. When EmEditor is launched for the first time after a fresh install, a new dialog box to select EmEditor Professional or EmEditor Free appears, and you can start using is as the Free version without even finding the Downgrade command.

Second, v21.2 includes the new Repeat Steps feature. This idea initially came from an informal talk with Mado-no-mori editors in Tokyo before the pandemic. They suggested using AI to detect next movements of EmEditor. I didn’t want to create any significant background tasks in EmEditor just to make the app slow down (remember Office assistant Clipper?), but I agree that some repetitive tasks should be simplified more easily. When you have repetitive tasks in a text editor, experienced users know how to record them as a macro, and repeat the macro as many times as necessary. However, it is often true that you want to try those steps without recording a macro first. By the time you decide to record steps as a macro, it’s often already half done, and you just want to finish the repetition without thinking more. The new Repeat Steps feature comes handy in this situation. Usually if you repeat certain task 3 times (might be adjusted in the future), a notification tip appears with the Enter Repeat Count hyperlink. Clicking on the link brings up the Repeat dialog box, where you can specify the number of times to repeat the steps. You can also select the Repeat Steps command on the Edit menu to bring up the Repeat dialog box without waiting for the notification tip appears. Basically, v21.2 permanently records a macro no matter the Start Recording command is turned on, and you will just need to pick a starting point of the macro when you want to repeat the recent steps.

Another convenient feature I’ve come up with is the Assign Keyboard Shortcut command displayed on the right-click menu on almost all menu items and toolbar buttons. This command opens the Keyboard page of Properties for All Configurations, and the command you right-clicked is pre-selected. This should save some time to find the command in the Keyboard page of configuration properties. From v21.2, All Configurations becomes the default setting for the Keyboard Map. It was a little confusing in the past that EmEditor allows you to assign keyboard shortcuts both only for the current configuration and for all configurations. I don’t believe most users would care assigning shortcuts for a particular configuration, so I wanted to make All Configurations the default for keyboard assignments.

Some customer complained that EmEditor didn’t show “ (0x93, U+201C) and ” (0x94, U+201D) characters in Western European HTML files correctly, and the HTML file had the charset=iso-8859-1 tag. The customer already acknowledged that this was due to difference in encoding in the ISO-8859-1 and the supserset Windows-1252 encodings. In fact, “ and ” characters were not defined in the ISO-8859-1 encoding, but defined in the Windows-1252 encoding. The fact is that many Western European HTML files were often mislabeled as iso-8859-1 while they should be labelled as windows-1252. According to the WHATWG community Living Standard, HTML5 interprets these HTML files as Windows-1252 encoding even if they are labeled as ISO-8859-1, and so does EmEditor v21.2 if the Detect HTML/XML Charset option is set.

There are a lot more stories while developing v21.2, but I will end this blog with introducing the new Notification feature when the Auto Copy feature is on when EmEditor is launched. I sometimes receive emails when their Copy and Paste went something wrong. This is most likely caused by the Auto Copy feature being turned on without their notice or being forgotten to turn off. So the new Notification will remind users that the Auto Copy feature is on.

I know some people are anxious about updating their OS to Windows 11. I usually trust my neighbors in Redmond, but this time, I don’t know. A customer has reported an issue related to this particular Windows 11 bug. EmEditor allows a user to select non-ASCII names for configurations and file types to be associated with EmEditor, and these names will become Registry keys. I would recommend waiting for a little while until Windows 11 becomes stable.

Finally, I hope you like EmEditor, whether you use it as Professional or Free version. Please contact us or write forums if you have any questions, feature requests, or any ideas in the future. I also welcome you to write a review, which I read them periodically. You might need to download the Store App version before you are able to write a review.

Thank you for using EmEditor!
— Yutaka Emura

Please see EmEditor v21.2 New Features for details and screenshots.

This release also includes following bug/issue fix:

  • Fixed a potential crash when opening a very large file on a certain computer such as a virtual computer.
  • Fixed a CSS/HTML Validator issue where it shows an error at Hiragana/Katakana only title tags.

If you use the Desktop Installer version, you can select Check for Updates on the Help to download the newest version. If this method fails, please download the newest version, and run the downloaded installer. If you use the Desktop portable version, you can go to the Download page to download the newest version. The Store App versions can be updated through Microsoft Store (64-bit or 32-bit) after a few days. If you use winget, you can type “winget install emeditor” to install the latest version of EmEditor (64-bit or 32-bit detected automatically).