Alex Elliott

I have recently been working on a new project under the working title of “Expression editor”, an application which allows for easy editing of Regular Expressions (regexps) in a similar way to KDE3.x’s KRegExpEditor.  I used to love KRegExpEditor for the incredibly useful functionality it provided, and in particular the visualisation of the regular expression as you edited it.  Being able to see graphically what the regexp was doing made dealing with long cryptic regexps much easier, and I felt it was a shame that it was not (as far as I know) ported to Qt4 and KDE SC 4.x.

A Screenshot of KRegExpEditor in Use

Since I felt it was a very useful application and one that I felt deserved to be ported to Qt4, I have started my own replacement (I decided to replace it rather than port mostly as a learning experience) written from the ground up in Qt4.  If it reaches a good level of stability I may consider porting it to be a KDE SC 4.x application, but for now I’m just focusing on building a working replacement.  After working on this for two weeks (start date: 23rd November 2009) I’ve reached a state where things are starting to come together.  If anyone’s interested the app is licensed under the GPLv3 and is available from GitHub.  Any bugs or feature requests are welcome at the project’s Issues page.  As of fairly recently it looks like this:

Expression Editor With an Email Matching Regexp Open

At the moment it includes some Oxygen icons, but due to the license on those they will be replaced before I release an actual stable version of the application.

Remember, if you do try it, it’s nowhere near stable yet – and a fair bit is yet to be implemented (like the drag and drop / GUI editing of expressions).