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.
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.
Various minor bugs and issues have been fixed. 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 Lite 8.4.2 version history
Since version 7.0.0, EditPad has supported bidirectional text editing to allow proper editing of files with text in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew as well as files that mix these with text in left-to-right scripts. You can enable this by choosing one of the complex script text layouts via the Options|Text Layouts menu. Choose a left-to-right complex script layout if most of your text is left-to-right. Choose a right-to-left complex script text layout if most of your text is right-to-left. You can select the default for each file type on the Editor page in the file type configuration.
Normally, the vertical scrollbar is positioned at the ends of the lines. So for left-to-right text the scrollbar sits at the right hand side, while for right-to-left text it should sit at the left hand side. EditPad 8.0.0 introduced a bug that caused the scrollbar to stay where it was when using the Options|Text Layouts menu to change the text direction. You had to switch between tabs for EditPad to move the scrollbar. This bug has been fixed. The scrollbar moves immediately when you change between text layouts with a different base text direction.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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 a bug we introduced in version 8.3.0. The Search|Replace Current, Replace and Find Next, and Replace and Find Previous commands 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 Lite 8.3.1 version history
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 8.3.0 version history
This release fixes a few bugs that affect previous 8.x.x releases.
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.
This release fixes one bug that we introduced in EditPad Lite 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.
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 Lite 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.
When EditPad Lite 8 runs with Administrator privileges it changes its taskbar and window icon from green to red. At high resolutions the red icon showed the letters “Pro“. Now it shows the letters “Lite” like the green icon does.
See also: EditPad Lite 8.2.2 version history
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. Most notably, the built-in “clickable URLs” scheme did not correctly update itself while typing.
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 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.
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 Help|Create Portable Installation menu item can now copy over all syntax coloring schemes that you have installed.
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.
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 unsaved changes before the PC reboots. 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 Lite 8.1.2 version history
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.
Normally, plain text files should not contain control characters other than tabs and line breaks. Most fonts cannot render control characters. To avoid issues with invisible control characters, EditPad 8 lets you choose how you want to visualize control characters as part of the text layout configuration. Now you can also configure the color of visualized control characters. To do so, customize the palette in the file type configuration. Scroll down the list of individual colors to find the Editor: Control Characters color.
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.
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 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 Lite 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.
A word wrap bug 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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 Lite 8 can take advantage of up to 6 CPU cores, depending on whether you’ve enabled features such as word wrap and syntax coloring.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 8.0.4 version history
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.
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 Lite 8.0.3 version history
This release fixes more bugs introduced by EditPad Lite 8.0.0.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 8.0.1 version history
EditPad Lite 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.
EditPad Lite 8 includes all the syntax coloring schemes that EditPad Pro 8 supports and has predefined file types that use them. EditPad Lite 8 can also download custom syntax coloring schemes created for EditPad Pro. If you purchase a license to EditPad Lite 8, you get the syntax coloring scheme editor as a bonus feature.
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.
EditPad Lite palettes now include many more colors so that you can customize the colors used by syntax coloring schemes. 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. 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.
The File|New and Options|File Type submenus that EditPad Pro had are now available in EditPad Lite too. All the new file types can make these submenus and the drop-down list in Open and Save dialogs 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Lite 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.
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 Lite 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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.
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.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.6.3 version history
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 Lite 7.6.2 version history
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.
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 automatically check for news and updates. You can do this by clicking the Proxy button after selecting Help|News and Updates in the menu. 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 Lite 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.
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 Lite 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. These changes mean that EditPad is now perfectly usable on all displays available on the market today, including laptops with 4K screens.
See also: EditPad Lite 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.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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 windows position, EditPad now allows the visible portion of the window border to sit directly against the edge of the screen.
A couple of bugs were also fixed. The version history has the details.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.4.0 version history
EditPad Lite can handle files up to 2 GB in size. It always reads files into memory entirely. If you need to work with larger files, or don’t want huge files to be read into memory entirely, you should consider upgrading to EditPad Pro.
EditPad Lite does not limit the number of files you can open at the same time. If you open a lot of huge files in EditPad Lite, then memory usage can quickly grow beyond 4 GB. If a single EditPad Lite instance actually ends up using more than 4 GB of RAM then random crashes could occur in the 64-bit builds of EditPad Lite 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 Lite, you should upgrade to version 7.3.8 immediately.
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).
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 Lite 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.
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 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.3.7 version history
This release fixes one bug. 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.
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.
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.
This release fixes one bug that was introduced in the previous release. EditPad 7.3.3 ignored the option to preserve the presence or absence of the byte order marker (Unicode signature) in existing files, which you can specify in Options|Configure File Types|Encoding. It 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 7.3.2 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.3.3 release notes
This release fixes one serious bug and a few minor issues. The serious bug was that if you attempted to use a regex with a syntax error on the Search panel then after than 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 minor issues involved rectangular selections and text layouts. Some commands that work on selections did not work correctly immediately after deleting a rectangular selection. Deleting a text layout and then switching to a tab that was using the bottommost text layout caused an index out of bounds error.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.3.2 version history
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 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 a 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.
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.
A few 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.
This release fixes one major issue we missed in version 7.2.0. In EditPad Lite 7.2.0, selecting text from right to left and then deleting the selection caused an access violation error. This bug has been fixed. The Search panel now handles invalid regular expressions a bit more gracefully.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.2.1 version history
EditPad Lite is now fully compatible with Windows 8. We only had to fix a few minor issues in the installer, and one issue in EditPad Lite 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 Lite, 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.
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.
In previous versions of EditPad, the Extra|Delete Duplicate Lines command used a speed optimization that in rare situations caused it to treat two lines that are different as duplicates. This optimization was removed to make the Delete Duplicate Lines command 100% accurate. To offset the loss in speed, the Delete Duplicate Lines command will now use all of your computer’s CPU cores to compare the lines in your file.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.1.1 version history
EditPad Lite’s installer now includes both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of EditPad Lite. 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 Lite under c:\Program Files (x86)\ on 64-bit Windows, then the EditPad Lite 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 Lite. 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 Lite is that it can now use all of the available RAM in your PC, rather than being limited to 2 GB. This allows you to keep more large files open at the same time. The 64-bit version of EditPad Lite still won’t open files larger than 2 GB. To edit files larger than 2 GB you need EditPad Pro, which has the ability to partially read files into memory via the “huge files threshold” setting in Options|Preferences|Open Files.
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 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.
EditPad Lite’s editor has two right-click menus. One appears when you right-click on selected text. The other appears when you right-click on text that is not selected (even if other text is selected). 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.
Several bugs have been fixed. 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 Lite 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.
EditPad Lite 7.0.0 added the ability to configure keyboard shortcuts via Options|Preferences|Keyboard. Previously this feature was only available in EditPad Pro. Unfortunately, the menu items in EditPad Lite did not actually use the keyboard shortcuts that you configured. This has now been fixed.
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 Lite 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.0.7 version history
This release fixes two bugs. 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.
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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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.
A whole bunch of minor bugs were fixed as well. The version history has the complete list.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.0.5 version history
On Windows 7, Options|Stay on Top caused EditPad 7 to stay on top of its own dialog boxes. This was fixed in EditPad Pro 7.0.3 but not in EditPad Lite 7.0.3. It is now fixed in EditPad Lite 7.0.4 too. 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.
See also: EditPad Lite 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.
Turning on Incremental Search in EditPad Lite 7 no longer causes seemingly arbitrary errors when editing the search term after closing a file.
See also: EditPad Lite 7.0.3 version history
EditPad Lite 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 Lite 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 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 Lite 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.
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 Lite 7.0.2 version history
The release of EditPad Lite 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, which is built into the purchased version of EditPad Lite, was also improved. The Delete Duplicate Lines command in the Extra menu can now be used.
See the EditPad Lite 7.0.1 version history for a complete list of fixes and improvements.
EditPad Lite 7 is a major upgrade from previous releases with lots of new features and improvements. These release notes only explain the most significant ones.
Since EditPad Lite was first released in the year 2000, it has always been free for personal use. EditPad Lite has never been available for business or government use. Business and government users had to purchase EditPad Pro. EditPad Lite 7 is still free for personal use. New is that business and government users can purchase a license to use EditPad Lite 7 as well as obtain technical support.
Several features that were available in EditPad Pro 6 but not in EditPad Lite 6 are now available in EditPad Lite 7. The Character Map (View menu) makes it easy to insert characters that are not available on your keyboard. You can use the Clip Collection (View menu) to store bits of text that you can easily insert into any file. If you use AceText, the Clip Collection panel in EditPad Lite 7 shows the active collection in AceText. This works with any version of AceText.
The Search panel in EditPad Lite 7 now has almost all the features of the EditPad Pro search panel. Important additions are regular expression support, highlighting search matches, and incremental search.
Several options from the Preferences screen in EditPad Pro are now available in EditPad Lite. This includes the ability to configure keyboard shortcuts and to automatically save working copies and backup copies.
EditPad Lite 7 now supports EditPad Pro’s command line parameters for opening the file at a particular line or character. This will allow the next free minor updates of RegexBuddy, RegexMagic, and PowerGREP to select search matches in EditPad Lite 7, like they already can with EditPad Pro 6.
All the toolbars and side panels in EditPad 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 and Windows 7. 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 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.
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.
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 anyting, this allows you to easily move lines around without always having to put the cursor at the start of the line.
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.
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.
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.
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.