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).
