StrongED 4.69 released

Announcement from Fred Graute, 1st September, 2013

Hi, I’m pleased to announce that StrongED 4.69 is now available.

Please note that this is a minimal release that contains only BaseMode. Other modes that you may wish to use have to be downloaded separately from the website (Download page -> Modes database).

There have been many of changes as well as a number of bug fixes. Some of the changes made are listed below.

About StrongED

StrongED is a general purpose text, file and program editor for RISC OS. Although StrongED is a very fully-featured and powerful editor, it is also surprisingly easy to use.

It may be used for writing an HTML page, writing emails, or writing text that you later propose to transfer to some other program such as Ovation Pro, Techwriter.

Alternatively it can be used to write Obey files (OS command scripts), Basic programs or source code in a variety of languages. It can also be useful for looking at the contents of non-text files, to see if there is anything meaningful!

List of changes

A lot of the work done for 4.69 has been behind the scenes stuff such as moving blocks of code to their own source file (source now consists of 32 files, from the original 17) and refactoring various bits of code. As a result there aren’t as many user facing changes as in previous releases but there are still some worthwhile new features.

One important change is that StrongED is now ARMv7 compatible meaning that it will run on all the new machines that are based on BeagleBoard, PandaBoard and Raspberry Pi.

Another big change, support for outline fonts has been much improved. Files with embedded control codes are now handled correctly, including printing. There however still minor glitches when using outline fonts, StrongED wasn’t originally designed with outline fonts in mind.

The Goto dialogue box has been extended, it’s now possible to go to a physical line, a logical line or a file offset (address in Dump mode).

Searching in Dump mode now searches the raw binary when displayed as Byte, Half, Word or ASCII. In Asm display the disassembly is searched. The Half display type has been added; it displays a file as 16 bit (half-word) values.

Advanced search has gained a few new search tokens:

  • <<< and >>> match start and end of text respectively
  • << and >> match the start or end of a paragraph
  • { and ( match the current search position against the bracket and search forward trough the text to find the matching closing bracket. Nesting is taken into account, strings and comments are skipped. The search continues after the matching bracket.

The List-of-Windows now allows you to close texts. If a text has been altered then it will be saved first. You can select the texts manually or you can filter out texts based on status (changed/unchanged), path and/or filetype.

Finally a few minor improvements: Added the option to make newlines visible. Filetypes &AA5 (TskBasic) and &9FB (Basalt) are recognised as containing Basic and detokenised on loading. List-of-Found & Throwback windows can now be scrolled using the scrollwheel on RISC OS 5.

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