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I’m a lifetime license owner and I really love the new filtering capabilities in the most recent EmEditor versions, which are highly useful to me in my work!
I have a couple of feature suggestion that would multiply this usefulness and power even more, which I very much hope that you will consider.
The first suggestion is to add the possibility of “negative filtering”, i.e. the capability to remove the lines that match the filter, instead of keeping only those that match the filter.
The second suggestion is to add the possibility for “chained filtering” / “progressive filtering” / “multiple filtering levels” as I guess it could be described. That is, let’s say that you have filtered out one category of lines by using the filter as usual. You now want to filter out just a subset of these already filtered lines, by just as easily being able to apply a filter to this set, i.e. irrespective of the original filter (which could otherwise be very hard to combine in a single filter statement, even when using regular expression, and especially if negative filtering as described in the previous paragraph were to be realized). One handy way of doing this it by adding some kind of “freeze filter result state” button of similar, which you could press at any time, and then clear the filter box and apply a new filter to the currently filtered output (contrary to the original contents of the file all over again). This would be the equivalent of saving the filtered results from the first filter to a file, and then applying a new filter to this new file. It would be MUCH more quick and handy to be able to do this without having to save the intermediate results to file all the time though, which is the entire reason for this suggestion!
Another way to explain this suggested feature is to mimic piped greps on a Linux command-line. For example on a Linux system, if I have a text file containing a collection of names (separated on their own lines), and I want to filter out all the names that does not contain “John”, “Adam” and “Paul”, and then finally, out of that filtered set keep only the ones that have the surname “Smith”, I would execute the following command-line of piped grep command, i.e. “chained filters”:
cat file_containing_names.txt | grep -v John | grep -v Adam | grep -v Paul | grep Smith
(the -v switch of the grep command provides negative filtering similar to the one in my feature suggestion above)
This is exactly the kind of simplicity and flexibility that the kind of progressive filtering (and negative filtering) that I suggest above would provide, which would be a VERY powerful, yet simple capability (both usability-wise and implementation-wise) to have in the world’s best text editor!
Hello LifeTimer,
The next version will have the “Negative” button and Advanced Filter (with multiple levels) features, exactly what you are looking for!
Thanks!
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