There’s another new test release of StrongED available – version 4.70a21 [zip file] – with an upgrade [zip file] available to use by anyone who already has version 4.70a20 (noting that it is unsuitable for use with any other versions). And if you want to look at it, the source code [zip file] is also available.
The main change in this version is to search and replace – quoting developer Fred Graute, “yes, again” – to provide control over the way it handles Dump files with three options: Skip, ASCII, and Code.
StrongED will automatically choose Code when a search is commenced and a disassembly is shown, defaulting to ASCII for any other display types and, when a search is started in a non-Dump mode, Skip is the initial mode, with the option to override.
The options at the time of the search are recorded when a ListOfFound (LoF) is produced, which means that even if the disassembly options of a searched text are changed later, the LoF continues to look the same.
Where StrongED is run on a system with a modern enough Debugger module, there are options to change the disassembly, such as using ARM registers (R0 to R15) or APCS (ARM Procedure Call Standard) registers (in which they have different names and numbers, according to the group in which they sit). This could be done in StrongED before at the ‘view’ level – i.e it could display the registers this way, but in the new test release it becomes a text level option – so, internally, the APCS register names are part of the actual text. Importantly, though, the change isn’t a global one – different texts can have different disassembly options.
Fred notes that this isn’t the last update to the search and replace aspect of StrongED, but that the next one will be purely internal, with no visible changes for the user.
New ‘modes’ have also been added in this release:
- ComoScript – a script language used in Composition, aka Compo, an commercial image manipulation tool originally available from Clares, now available for free.
- Markdown – a simple markup language that uses plain text formatting, with symbols like the hash character to indicate levels of text heading, asterisks around words or italics, and double asterisks for bold, and so on.
Fred says he has also fixed the Java mode – and other, non-mode related, fixes include addressing a problem whereby Replace using the Simple search engine inserted 0x00s, dealing with a bug in which an advanced replace string without a terminating quote mark would abort, and he has tweaked the ‘Counter…’ button’s lack of shading when the engine isn’t Advanced.
