Alex Elliott

Since I’ve had some more time to work on Expression Editor recently I thought it was about time I wrote another update for the progress of the project, and some related news that affects it.

A recent screenshot of Expression Editor on Mac OSX

From Last Time…

In the previous post I noted a few areas in progress and some that I wanted to look at in the future.  So to catch up there, Drag&Drop is generally a bit more reliable and produces slightly neater results but is otherwise unchanged so far, and the new testing widget is still waiting.  A significant change has been made in the area of supported regular expression formats however.

The application now has backends for Qt4, PCRE and POSIX ERE formats (though the visualisation could still mess up some PCRE/POSIX elements, let me know if anything breaks).  You can select the format you wish to work in from the menu bar, it will be displayed in the bottom right of the screen so you know which mode it is currently in, and the save format has been slightly extended to save your preference for each particular expression.

The default mode has also been changed to PCRE, since it is probably the most powerful backend available.  Another minor UI change has been included which is an expression status indicator to the right of the text input.  A green tick while valid, and a red exclamation mark when invalid, in addition if you mouseover the invalid indicator, the tooltip is the error returned from the active regular expression backend.

In Related News

As you probably saw above the screenshot used is from Mac OSX.  In order to improve my capacity to test Expression Editor I’ve gotten myself a Mac Mini as well as my Slackware Linux laptop.  Set up with Synergy+ this means I can simultaneously develop the application in Linux and test it in OSX.  One behavioural difference between the two operating systems has already been resolved, so hopefully the application should start behaving much more reliably on OSX as well as Linux from now on.