Today, we are releasing EmEditor v21.6.0.

The previous version of EmEditor allowed you to visualize specified characters, but you had to specify character ranges by character code values if you selected the specified ranges option. This could become a tedious task when character code values of your interest are scattered all over the Unicode chart. The new version allows you to specify character ranges by Unicode Script and Unicode General Category. For instance, if you write only Latin text, it is a good idea to select the Latin (Latn) and Common (Zyyy) scripts, and set the Warn characters outside of the specified ranges option. You can combine Unicode Script with Unicode General Category. For instance, you can set

"Latn,Zyyy,Ll,Lu"

meaning Latin (Latn) OR Common (Zyyy) scripts AND lowercase letters (Ll) OR uppercase letters (Lu).

To make this feature possible, we have updated the Unicode database included in the EECommon.dll library to allow you to specify character ranges by Unicode Script and/or Unicode General Category. The new information is also included in a dialog box displayed when you select the Character Code Value command. The EECommon.dll library will not be loaded into memory until information is requested, so EmEditor load time will not affected by this feature addition. The EECommon.dll library was first developed by Makoto Emura.

EmEditor v21.1 supported all emoji sequences in Emoji Sequences and Emoji ZWJ Sequences, but they were not comprehensive and not future-proof if new emoji sequences are introduced in the future. The new version of EmEditor used the definition specified in Unicode Technical Standard #51 – Unicode Emoji to support all possible emoji. Supporting emoji means that these emoji characters are displayed correctly as long as they are supported by fonts, and the cursor movement around emoji is correct. While we were working on these changes, we updated the Unicode database to the latest version (Unicode v14.0.0).

A customer asked if it is possible to convert various date formats in a text file to one date format. EmEditor v21.3 supported date/time formats in Number Ranges. While this feature was useful for finding and filtering specific date/time ranges, it was useless if you need to convert them to one specific date/time format. The new version introduces \D and \T expressions to the Replace Expression Syntax. For instance, if you have a text file containing dates with various formats such as:

3/23/2022
03/23/2022
March 23,2022
Mar 23,2022
23-Mar-2022
2022-03-23
2022年3月23日

and if you want to convert all of these to one format “2022-03-22“, you can press CTRL+H to bring up the Replace dialog box, set the Number Range option, and enter:

Find:

[1/1/1900 , 1/1/2200 "M/d/yyyy|MM/dd/yyyy|MMMM d,yyyy|MMM d,yyyy|dd-MMM-yyyy|yyyy-MM-dd|yyyy年M月d日" ]

Replace with:

\Dyyyy-MM-dd

This Find expression will search for these formats between 1/1/1900 and 1/1/2200, and the matched dates are converted to the yyyy-MM-dd format.

While I was working on the replacement expression syntax, I also added new \Nc, \Nd, \NC, and \ND expressions to normalize strings, using the Unicode Normalization commands introduced on EmEditor v19.8. These new expressions are useful when you need to normalize characters that match certain search criteria.

All of the aforementioned features are supported on EmEditor Professional and EmEditor Free.

The main feature of EmEditor Professional v21.6 is significantly improved speeds of Advanced Filter and Multi-Find with many simple non-regex search strings. A customer asked if it was possible to search a file for 25 million phone numbers. This was not easy on earlier version of EmEditor because it became very slow when more than thousands of search strings are specified. I came up with a new algorithm for this situation, and optimized the code significantly so that it is now possible to accept 25 million search strings simultaneously. While I was working on this optimization, I also made it possible for Advanced Filter and Batch Find/Replace dialog boxes to accept a linked file. A linked file may contain multiple search strings separated by newlines. You can drag and drop a linked file from Explorer to the list box in Advanced Filter or Batch Find/Replace dialog box. You may also drag and drop a linked file to the Filter box on the Filter toolbar to start Advanced Filter immediately. A linked file makes it easier to maintain a set of search strings and to apply the changes instantly to Advanced Filter or Multi-Find. Since EmEditor internally sorts search strings (by length and by alphabetical order) before making searches, you can improve the speed by presorting your linked files. If you decide to presort linked files, set the Fast Binary Comparison and Stable Sort options in the Sort page of the Customize dialog box. The Ignore case option should be set if you don’t match case on Advanced Filter. Open a linked file, select Sort A to Z first, and then select Sort Shortest to Longest. Presorting linked files is not required, and will not change the search results, but will improve the speed.

Furthermore, the Extract All button on the Filter toolbar is now a drop-down button, and clicking the button will display a menu where you can select between the Extract All Lines and Extract Matched Strings commands. The Extract Matched Strings command will extract only one string per line if multiple strings are matched.

I also optimized the speed of the Join CSV command when the … contains …, … starts with …, or … ends with … conditions are selected, using the similar algorithm to the Advanced Filter command.

A customer requested a new option, which is the Selection Mode item in the Status page of the Customize dialog box. If this is set, the status bar indicates “Vertical” while the vertical selection mode is active, and “Lines” while the line selection mode is active.

A customer reported a crash while launching EmEditor, and sent me a crash report file. I looked into the crash report and found that EmEditor crashed by an out-of-memory situation due to a very large file history. This customer was setting 30000 days to the Save Cursor Position option and set the Never Clear Bookmarks option in the History page of the Customize dialog box. This caused a very large file history to be created. To prevent this kind of issue from happening, the new version removed the Never Clear Bookmarks check box, and limit the saving time of cursors and bookmarks to 100 days.

Finally, I hope you like EmEditor, whether you use the Professional or Free version. Please contact us or write in forums if you have any questions, feature requests, or any ideas in the future.)

Thank you for using EmEditor!
— Yutaka Emura

Please see EmEditor v21.6 New Features for details and screenshots.

This release also includes the following bug/issue fix:

• Fixed a bug where the Find Next/Previous Warning Character/Unicode command might have missed surrogate user-defined characters.
• Fixed a bug where EmEditor could crash at the BatchReplace method if the batch array is empty.
• Fixed issues related to Layouts.
• Fixed a bug where the Find Next/Previous button in the Find dialog box did not work well with surrogate characters.
• Fixed a bug where character spacing might become irregular.
• Fixed a bug where the vertical scroll position might be at the bottom if a window is split vertically and when switching documents.
• Fixed a bug where syntax errors appeared when opening certain CSV files but clicking the Check Syntax button cleared all the errors.
• Fixed a v21.5 bug where EmEditor might have shown the “File changed by another program. Reload with changes?” message box sometimes when network files are opened.
• Fixed customer-reported issues (1).

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

Today, we are releasing EmEditor v21.5.2.

Updates from v21.5.1 include:

• Fixed a bug where EmEditor could freeze on certain emoji sequences if the Warn invisible characters option is turned on.
• Fixed a pre-v21.5 issue where bookmarks could disappear on the Line Up/Down command.
• The new version stops Find in Files if a regex error occurs.
• Changed the behavior of the Word Left command when spaces following after a word.
• Adjusted the vertical scroll position after the Encode/Decode Selection commands when lines are wrapped.
• Fixed an issue where EmEditor could not stop macros at alert(), confirm(), prompt() methods if run asynchronously on some computers.
• Fixed customer-reported issues (1).
• Fixed a potential crash while opening XML files (avoided syntax check while reading a file).
• Supported more Emoji ZWJ Sequences, and fixed behaviors of the character check.
• Fix an issue where the In Selection Only option in the Find/Replace dialog box was set in sticky vertical selection mode even if only one line is selected.

Please see EmEditor v21.5 New Features for details and screenshots.

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

Today, we are releasing EmEditor v21.5.0.

The biggest advantage of using Unicode is that you can include any character you want into a document. The drawback is that it can include any unwanted characters for some people. Those unwanted characters may include invisible characters such as U+200B (ZERO WIDTH SPACE) and control characters such as U+0081. Try copying the following text and paste it to Notepad or other text editors.

"​" invisible character (U+200B)
"" control character (U+0081)

Since these characters often become invisible in Notepad and many other text editors, they could become security issues if used unintentionally. Untrusted source code containing invisible characters could contain a hidden backdoor. If you copy source code from code-sharing sites such as StackOverflow and paste it to your text editor, you want to make sure the source code is free of those unwanted characters. Another example is that you might be editing a data file that contains user input text data. Since users could input any text data, the text might include invisible or control characters that need to be cleaned up before being parsed. If a text editor couldn’t show those characters, it would become difficult to find those characters.

The new main feature of v21.5 becomes useful in these cases. v21.5 can visualize these invisible and control characters. While you can use this feature with its default settings, you can optionally customize which characters to warn, or which characters to approve. If you edit data files that consist of only certain character types (such as English alphabets, numbers, and a few symbols), you might want to define those characters as approved characters. You can set EmEditor to warn characters in the specified character ranges, or characters outside of the specified character ranges. Moreover, you can have EmEditor check for those unwanted characters automatically while saving documents. This feature is supported on EmEditor Professional and EmEditor Free.

Another new feature of v21.5 is the EditorConfig support. If you work as a team, and if each member of the team uses a different text editor, the team can create .editorconfig files that define coding styles such as indent styles, newline characters, and file encodings. Since v21.5 conforms to the EditorConfig specifications, you don’t need to change EmEditor options manually to conform with the team project settings as long as the options are set in .editorconfig files.

For instance, if your team wants you to use a line-feed (LF) as the newline code and to use the indent size of 4, your team can create a .editorconfig file in the same (or parent) folder containing the following lines.

[*.txt]
end_of_line = lf
indent_size = 4

All text editors supporting EditorConfig, including EmEditor v21.5, will look for this file and will set their options accordingly and automatically for the specified file types.

This feature can be useful even if you don’t work with a team. For instance, if you want to have “a.txt” and “b.txt” files to show without lines wrapped, but if you want other text files to have lines wrapped, you can create a .editorconfig file containing the following lines:

[{a,b}.txt]
max_line_length = off

This technique will avoid a need to create a new configuration in EmEditor just for simple options supported in EditorConfig.

While I optimized the code for speed, the EditorConfig support can slow down opening files especially if you open files from slow drives or network. In that case, you can turn off the option by clearing the Use .editorconfig option to the Edit page of the Customize dialog box. The EditorConfig feature is supported on EmEditor Professional and EmEditor Free, but the Use .editorconfig option is available only on EmEditor Professional (the feature is always enabled on EmEditor Free).

Since we supported the insert_final_newline property of EditorConfig, we also added the Ensure a newline exists at the end of each file option to the Save Details dialog box. This feature is supported on EmEditor Professional and EmEditor Free.

A customer has asked if he can utilize the Sum of the selected numbers displayed in the Status bar in his macros. The new Sum and Average properties of the Selection object allows you to use those numbers. Since these properties work faster, the included Sum.jsee macro was rewritten to use the Sum property. This feature is supported only on EmEditor Professional.

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

Thank you for using EmEditor!
— Yutaka Emura

Please see EmEditor v21.5 New Features for details and screenshots.

This release also includes the following bug/issue fix:

• Fixed a pre-v21.4 issue where the Find in Files command might not have worked correctly if a very long path exists under a certain condition.
• Fixed a pre-v21.4 issue where Find without Match Case might have failed if the Count Frequent Strings option was set.
• Fixed a v21.4.1 issue where Regex searches with the Search All Documents in the Group option might have failed.
• Fixed the horizontal scroll bar issue when a window is split horizontally.
• Fixed a pre-v21.4 issue related to mouse selection while scrolling up.
• Fixed a potential crash when right-clicking on toolbars.
• Fixed customer-reported issues (1, 2).

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

Today, we are releasing EmEditor v21.4.0.

Since EmEditor Free supported very large files in the previous version, it was pleasant to see that more people have used EmEditor Free. However, since EmEditor Free showed the Upgrade Information notification as a balloon tip on the right bottom corner, a user asked me if it was possible to hide this balloon tip. Thus, v21.4 allows you to hide any notifications or balloon tips on EmEditor Free. Another new feature for EmEditor Free is Automatic Updates, which allows you to update EmEditor to the latest version with a single click or have it apply new updates automatically on exit. Because of these new features, the Customize dialog box now includes the Notifications and Update pages in EmEditor Free (previously, only the Language page existed in EmEditor Free).

The main feature of EmEditor Professional v21.4 is a set of new data-analysis commands—Transpose, Pivot Table, and Unpivot—used for CSV documents. Last month, a customer asked me if I could add these commands. I was not familiar with these commands when I was first asked, but I thought they would become so powerful in analyzing big data that I wanted to implement them as soon as possible. The Transpose command simply switches the rows and columns of a CSV document. The Pivot Table finds all distinct values for a specified column, and for each distinct value, the command counts the occurrences or calculates the total values in another specified column. The Unpivot command is the reverse of the Pivot Table command. When I developed these commands, I wanted to make sure they are simple enough to use even if users aren’t familiar with them. For instance, I placed each option of the Pivot Table dialog box visually as the actual location of a pivot table. These commands can be recorded to a macro, which you can reuse later for repeated use. I also wanted to make sure they run as fast as possible, so I’ve spent much of my time optimizing the code for speed. Moreover, I added new options to the Combine Columns dialog box, and spent much time to improve the speed of the Combine Columns, Split Column(s), and Encode/Decode Selection commands while columns are selected in the CSV mode. Therefore, EmEditor Professional v21.4 allows you to analyze big data more quickly while you deal with CSV files.

We added these toolbar buttons for Transpose, Pivot Table and Unpivot commands but the existing CSV/Sort toolbar became too big. Thus, v21.4 separates the CSV/Sort toolbar into the CSV toolbar and Sort toolbar. Some people might think that the new Sort toolbar also contains CSV-related buttons, so why not call it “CSV/Sort”? Well, I just wanted to make the title short, but you can customize toolbar titles as well as buttons in the Toolbars dialog box.

As I wrote in my previous message, we refreshed the dialog box fonts for Japanese, Korean, and other languages, but this was met with some negative feedback. Therefore, I made the font face names customizable as well as the size in the Window page of the Customize dialog box.

A customer reported that the Uppercase/Lowercase commands do not convert some letters correctly. For instance, in Turkish, the uppercase of i is İ (U+0130, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE), and the lowercase of I is ı (U+0131, LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I). All the previous versions of Uppercase/Lowercase commands were using locale-independent conversions. v21.4 added the Locale-dependent Uppercase/Lowercase option to the Edit page of the Customize dialog box, which you can use for locale-dependent conversions. The locale is customizable in the Sort page of the Customize dialog box. The locale-dependent conversions require more time to process, and the option does not apply to other features including searches and replaces.

Some customers reported that macros do not finish correctly when a message box appears, for instance, by the alert method. I couldn’t reproduce the issue, but the issue appears on customers’ computers when macros run asynchronously. Thus, I added the Run macros asynchronously by default option to the Options page of the Customize Macros dialog box, and turning this option off will fix this issue.

We receive many inquiries regarding the recent Log4j vulnerability issues, but EmEditor does not use Java components, thus EmEditor is not vulnerable for CVE-2021-44228, CVE-2021-45046 (Log4j).

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

Happy Holiday!
— Yutaka Emura

Please see EmEditor v21.4 New Features for details and screenshots.

This release also includes the following bug/issue fix:

• Fixed a pre-v21.3 issue where the Combine Lines command might not have worked correctly when the Remove empty strings option is set.
• Fixed an issue with certain fonts while using DirectWrite.
• Fixed an issue where the “Error: Update installation failed” message might have appeared even though the installation was successful.
• Fixed customer-reported issues (1, 2, 3, 4).

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

Today, we are releasing EmEditor v21.2.1.

Updates from v21.2.0 include:

• The new version will display the Jump dialog box when clicking the File Position at Cursor in the Status Bar.
• Fixed a pre-v21.2 bug where EmEditor could crash while opening a very large file containing a very long line.
• Fixed an issue where the Main Menu could disappear after restoring the Full Screen mode by menu.
• Adjusted detection timing of Repeated Steps.
• Fixed localization issues on v21.2.0.
• Fixed an issue where the menu items could become empty if the menu was customized before.
• Made DirectWrite off by default on Windows 7 SP1.
• Fixed customer-reported issues (1, 2).

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

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

Thank you for using EmEditor!