[ jEdit-users ] jEdit 4.1pre3 now available

[Slava P. <sl...@je...>]

jEdit 4.1pre3 is now available from <http://www.jedit.org>.

Thanks to Ivan Herman, Kris Kopicki, Marco Hunsicker, Matthias Schneider
and Rudolf Widmann for contributing to this release.

+ Syntax Highlighting Changes:

- Added regular expression matching features. Currently this is used to
  implement better (but still not 100% accurate) highlighting of various
  constructs in Perl mode, like s/// and such.

  - SEQ_REGEXP rule: highlights a sequence matching a regular
    expression.
  - SPAN_REGEXP rule: like SPAN but the start string is a regular
    expression (the end cannot be a regular expression currently).
  - EOL_SPAN_REGEXP rule: ditto, but for EOL_SPAN.

  - All rules must define a HASH_CHAR attribute; this is the character
    that the rule will be hashed by, to avoid checking every character
    against every regexp.

- Added a new AT_WORD_START attribute to all syntax rules. If this is
  set to TRUE, the rule will only match if it is at the start of a token
  boundary (in most cases, this is the same as a word boundary, hence
  the name).

  To illustrate the difference, suppose you have a SPAN rule that
  matches from "quux(" to ")". Without AT_WORD_START, it would highlight
  this sequence:

  foobarquux(hello world)

  However with AT_WORD_START it would only highlight if there was a
  token in between foobar and quux().

- CHILL (CCITT recommendation language) syntax highlighting added.
  (Rudolf Widmann)

- Updated CSS syntax highlighting for CSS2 spec. (Ivan Herman)

- Updated AWK and COBOL syntax highlighting. (Matthias Schneider)

+ Editing Changes:

- Previously when expanding an abbreviation with positional parameters,
  unspecified parameters would expand to $n where 'n' is the number of
  the parameter. This was not very intuitive; now missing parameters
  expand to empty strings, and result in a status bar message being
  shown.

+ File System Browser Changes:

- In file dialog boxes, the 'File name' text field now supports
  auto-completion. Previously auto-completion was only supported in the
  browser view itself.

- For some reason I can't remember now, the state of the 'Filter' check
  box was only being saved on the browser, and not the dialog box
  versions of this control. I have changed this so the state of the
  check box is preserved in all cases.

- You can now right-click on directories in the parent directory list to
  display a menu of commands.

+ Global Options Dialog Changes:

- Added an option to Utilities->Global Options->Docking for
  jEdit 4.0-style tool bar placement.

- Text area and gutter color settings have been moved to the Text Area
  and Gutter panes of the Global Options dialog box; the Colors pane is
  no longer.

- The "smart home" and "smart end" settings are now much more flexible.
  Instead of them being flags in the Text Area pane, the various
  behaviors of the Home and End keys have been split into multiple
  actions, all of which can be bound to any shortcut key (including HOME
  and END of course) in the Shortcuts pane.

+ Window Docking Changes:

- 'Close Top/Left/Bottom/Right Docking Area' commands all merged into a
  single 'Close Current Docking Area' command, bound by default to
  C+e C+BACK_QUOTE.

- 'Go to Top/Left/Bottom/Right Docking Area' commands added, bound by
  default to C+e C+UP/LEFT/DOWN/RIGHT. It opens the docking area in
  question if it is closed, and sends keyboard focus to the selected
  dockable window.

- 'Go to Text Area' command added, bound by default to C+e C+e. It sends
  keyboard focus to the text area.

- The popup menu shown when right-clicking on the strip of buttons in a
  dockable window container now contains a new sub-menu, labelled "New
  Floating Instance". This menu contains items which open new floating
  instances of the windows docked in this area.

+ User Interface Changes:

- A few more menu bar rearrangements:
  - 'Recent Directories' moved from File to Utilities menu.
  - 'Current Directory' moved from File to Utilities menu.
  - 'Select Line Range' from from Edit to Edit->More Selection.
  - BeanShell evaluation commands moved from Macros to
    Utilities->BeanShell.
  - Various troubleshooting-related commands moved from Utilities to
    Utilities->Troubleshooting (like they were in 4.1pre1).

- More tool bar icons added. (Kris Kopicki)

+ Miscellaneous Changes:

- The JARClassLoader now registers plugin packages and manifest files.
  (Marco Hunsicker)

- Because a lot of people send me their .jedit/activity.log files
  without invoking 'Update Activity Log on Disk' first, I have added a
  notice to this file, stating that you must invoke the above command
  otherwise the file will be incomplete.

- Added two new actions, by default not in any menu, nor bound to any
  keystroke; 'Toggle Line Separator' and 'Toggle Word Wrap'. They have
  the same effect as clicking the appropriate section of the status bar,
  and they can be bound to shortcut keys or added to the tool bar, etc.

- Removed ICONS.LICENSE.txt file since we no longer use the Sun icons.

+ Bug Fixes:

- Clicking the 'Open' button or pressing Enter in the 'Open File' dialog
  box did not work; only double-clicking would open files.

- Changing the tab size, indent size or maximum line length settings on
  a global or mode-specific basis should now take effect in all open
  buffers. Previously changes to these settings would only take effect
  in subsequently opened files.

- Under some circumstances the file system browser would case a
  different buffer to be selected in the current view after a directory
  was loaded. It has been confirmed that one jEdit user was admitted
  to a mental asylum because of this bug.

- The file system browser's 'Encoding' menu did not work at all.

- Adding a mode to the user modes directory with the same name as one in
  the system directory would not take effect until jEdit was restarted.

- Abbreviations whose expansions started with the text "<html>" could
  cause problems since Swing automatically tries to display such strings
  as HTML. A workaround has now been added.

- If a virtual file system displayed a dialog box upon creating a VFS
  session (for example, an FTP login dialog box), cancelling the dialog
  would leave the file system browser stuck with a 'Loading' message.
  This has now been fixed.

- If multiple selection mode was enabled, clicking the mouse did not
  move the caret! What a silly bug...

- If a mode file did not contain well-formed XML, the resulting error
  dialog box would be empty.

- Due to an oversight when implementing the ability to have startup
  scripts written in any language, scripts were being run in their
  own namespace in 4.1pre2; as a result functions and variables defined
  at startup were not available to other macros.

+ API Changes:

- Buffer.getFile() method deprecated. Use Buffer.getPath() and the VFS
  API instead.