Alex Elliott

Well, been a while since the last blog post I’ve written, and a similar stretch of time since I really got much work done on ExpressionEditor. But as you might have guessed since the blog is winding back into life, so to is my work on EE.

Changes So Far

I’m still working my way slowly through the todo list for EE (updated now on the wiki.github home page for EE), major differences that I’ve already managed to cross off include adding support for the ICU regular expression library, and migrating the build process over to CMake (which is still partly ongoing, the more people build it on as many platforms as possible the better – please do report any issues, in IRC would be favourite as I can work through the issues directly).

ICU (International Components for Unicode) supports a regular expression engine that seems to be a popular choice particularly for Mac-based programming, and appears to be fairly full-featured.  I hope that ICU support will be useful to people, and that it gets good use.

As to the migration to CMake, this is for several reasons: it should make it easier to distribute at the moment it supports a very basic “make install” target, and I will be expanding that to bring the common files into /etc (and at some point I should improve the content of those common files, but that’s something I can do later) and also expanding that to take the README, CREDITS, and similar files into documentation.

It should also now correctly auto-detect which of the optional dependencies (all of the regular expression libraries bar that included in Qt4.6+) are present on the system, and build a version of EE which supports the ones which are available.  This hopefully will make it less of a pain for those who don’t have PCRE or ICU (or in the case of Win32 POSIX’s regex.h).

And talking of making it easier for Win32, after a fairly long period where no EE was compiled on Win32 it was recently built, at the least proving that the code is still very happy to compile there when it’s not missing optional deps – which is very good news to get.

Looking Forward

Of course, there’s still quite a lot to do to reach the plans I’ve set out, and since I’m working full-time I don’t have as much time as I’d like to work on EE (which I hope you’ll agree is an interesting and quite fun little tool, and it’s just as nice to work on ).  But I expect to make some progress nonetheless, and if I do, I’ll keep all one maybe two people who have this in their RSS readers up to speed.