How To Get The Latest Version of EditPad Lite

EditPad Lite 8 was released on 23 December 2019. If you purchased EditPad Lite on or after 23 December 2019, then you purchased EditPad Lite 8 and you can download the latest version immediately. If you purchased EditPad Lite between 23 December 2018 and 22 December 2019 then you purchased EditPad Lite 7 and got a free major upgrade to EditPad Lite 8. If you did not receive the email with the new user ID for the free major upgrade, enter your email address on the download page to have it resent.

If you purchased EditPad Lite prior to 23 December 2018 then you own EditPad Lite version 7. If you download EditPad Lite again, you will receive the latest free minor update for you. Since you already own a previous version, you can buy version 8 at the discounted price of US$ 14.95 instead of the full price of US$ 29.95 which new customers pay.

If you are not sure which version you own, simply type in your user id and email address below. If you own version 8, you will be told you can download the latest version free of charge. If not, you will be presented with the form to purchase the upgrade.

If it says it cannot find your email address then you may have been using the freeware version of EditPad Lite. You can use the freeware version at home or at school for purposes that don’t generate money.

You can upgrade to EditPad Lite 8 via our secure online checkout. We accept all major credit cards, debit cards, and prepaid cards. You can also pay by bank transfer. When paying with a card or another instantaneous payment method you will be able to download EditPad Lite 8 immediately after completing checkout.

Please enter the email address associated with your current EditPad Lite license, and your EditPad Lite user ID. If you lost your user ID, you can have it resent instantly by entering your email address on the download page. If you have your user ID, it doesn’t matter if the email address no longer works. You can enter new contact details on the order form.

The exact pricing depends on the number of users you want the upgraded license to be valid for. If you leave the “number of users to upgrade” box blank, then your EditPad Lite 8 license will be valid for the same number of users as your previous EditPad Lite license. If you want to increase or decrease the number of users, enter the total number of users that the upgraded license should be valid for. If the number of users you want to upgrade is the same or less than you had on the original license, then the price is calculated using the following table with the volume discount for the number of users you are upgrading. If the number of users you want on the upgraded license is greater than you had on the original license, then the price is the sum of the upgrade cost for the users on the original license with the volume discount for the number of users on the original license, plus the new user price for the additional users with the volume discount for the total number of users on the upgraded license. For larger quantities than listed below, please contact us.

Prices shown on our website exclude taxes. Sales tax, VAT, or GST will be added during checkout if your country imposes such taxes on internet sales. You will have the opportunity to provide a tax ID or VAT number to remove the tax if your business is tax exempt.

What’s New in EditPad Lite 8

EditPad Lite 8 is a major upgrade from previous releases with lots of new features and improvements. These release notes only explain the most significant ones. The version history has the complete list.

Installation

The Advanced Options button in the installer now gives you a choice between installing EditPad for all users and installing for the current user only. The latter option enables a proper installation of EditPad with desktop icons and file associations, without requiring administrator privileges.

Appearance

The most apparent change in EditPad 8 are the new toolbar icons. The new flat look of the icons better matches the flat look of Windows 10. EditPad includes them in 10 different sizes that cover all the scaling increments from 100% to 400% available in the basic display settings in Windows. EditPad can now correctly scale its toolbars on all PC and laptop displays, including small laptops with 4K screens. Toolbar icons can now be switched between small, medium, and large sizes by right-clicking the toolbar.

You can customize the mouse pointer on the Cursors page in the Preferences. You can now have a different pointer over selected text. Custom mouse pointers now support sizes larger than 32x32 when DPI scaling is set to 200% or more, supporting DPI scaling up to 400%. If you select a custom mouse pointer with inside and outside colors then those colors are also used for the mouse pointer that indicates scrolling when you click the editor with the mouse wheel. This scrolling cursor now supports all resolutions between 100% and 400% display scaling.

EditPad has a new dark theme that makes EditPad’s entire user interface use white text with black and dark gray backgrounds. You can toggle this theme with the View|Dark Theme menu item. The menu item also switches the color palettes assigned to file types between dark and light variants.

The Panels page in the Preferences has a new option to make the side panels use the same colors as the editor. This causes the side panels to change colors when switching between files that use different palettes. It makes EditPad’s colors more uniform.

Syntax Coloring and Color Palettes

EditPad Lite 8 includes all the syntax coloring schemes that EditPad Pro 8 supports and has predefined file types that use them. EditPad Lite 8 can also download custom syntax coloring schemes created for EditPad Pro. If you purchase a license to EditPad Lite 8, you get the syntax coloring scheme editor as a bonus feature.

You can select a syntax coloring scheme and a color palette for each file type on the Colors & Syntax page in the file type configuration. Many more predefined color palettes are now available. There are “Solarized” and “Harmonized” palettes with reduced contrast and monochrome palettes for which the color picker only shows a limited set of colors. For these palettes, the picker shows all the colors used in the selected palette in the order that they are first used so you can easily use exactly the same color for multiple elements. There are also new palettes optimized for the most common types of color blindness.

Each color palette now has an associated printing palette with black text on a pure white background. The printing palette is used as the default when printing. Selecting a palette with a colored background in the print preview now prints the file with that background color which may use a lot of ink.

Color palettes can now be exported into separate .ini files so you can easily share them with others.

EditPad Lite palettes now include many more colors so that you can customize the colors used by syntax coloring schemes. The new “Editor: Extra space between lines” color allows you to display ruled lines by setting it to a different color than the plain text color and by adding extra space between lines in the text layout configuration.

You now have more options to customize individual colors. Many different underlining styles are now available. Underline can now use a different color than the font. You can now add a strikeout, which can have the same or a different color as the font. Bold and italic now offer an “unchanged” choice that uses the style selected in the text layout configuration; this allows the “off” choice to force bold or italic to be off. The new Copy and Paste buttons make it easy to apply the same settings to the same named color. Selecting “default” as the background, text, or underline color for selected text now leaves that color unchanged when text is selected instead of using the highlighting colors of the Windows theme.

File Types

The File|New and Options|File Type submenus that EditPad Pro had are now available in EditPad Lite too. All the new file types can make these submenus and the drop-down list in Open and Save dialogs very long. You can now reduce those lists by turning off the new “Show in file type selection lists” option on the Definition page in the file type configuration for file types that you don’t normally use. File types that you hide this way do remain functional. If you open a file that matches the file mask of a hidden file type, EditPad does use the hidden file type’s settings for that file.

Files normally have an extension such as .txt on the Windows platform. EditPad uses the extension to determine the file type, which determines the settings to use for the file. On UNIX platforms, text files often have no extension. EditPad now has a predefined “Without Extension” file type that determines EditPad’s settings for files without an extension. The file mask *. is now interpreted as a file masks for files without an extension (or any dot in their name at all) to make this file type possible.

Text Encoding

Setting a file type’s default encoding to Unicode could cause problems when opening a file that is not Unicode. Setting the default encoding to UTF-16 and then opening a file that has ASCII text would appear as Chinese gibberish until you used Convert|Text Encoding to reinterpret with the correct legacy code page. Now you can specify a non-Unicode encoding for each file type that has Unicode as its default encoding. EditPad will use this fallback encoding for files that aren’t valid Unicode files or that reference unassigned code points.

Text Layout

EditPad now better supports modern programming fonts like Fira Code and Hasklig that can form ligatures of ASCII characters. It even uses these fonts by default for its monospaced text layouts if they are available when you first run EditPad.

Complex script text layouts previously supported most ASCII ligatures. Now they also support ligatures with parentheses and angle brackets. They work correctly with all fonts that support ASCII ligatures. Ligatures remain when they are partially selected or when syntax coloring applies different colors to the characters that form the ligature.

The monospaced left-to-right text layout previously did not support ASCII ligatures. Now it does. But it only works correctly with fonts like Fira Code and Hasklig that use one glyph per character even for ligatures. It does not work with fonts like DejaVu Sans Code that use one glyph per ligature. Ligatures are broken (showing the original characters) when they are partially selected or when syntax coloring applies different colors to the characters that would have formed the ligature. This text layout no longer clips italic overhang at the end of words or at color changes, as was already the case for other text layouts.

All text layouts now have independent options for treating underscores, hyphens, other punctuation, currency symbols, math symbols, and/or symbols as word characters.

The monospaced left-to-right text layout now assumes that characters in right-to-left scripts are stored in visual order in the file. This allows files from old (DOS) systems that did not support modern bidirectional editing to be displayed correctly. As a consequence, the monospaced left-to-right text layout also disables automatic font substitution. Only characters supported by the font will be displayed.

The non-monospaced left-to-right text layout still allows Windows font substitution, and does not support ligatures. Complex script text layouts now always use the main font for visualized spaces and generic line breaks.

Text files normally don’t contain control characters other than tabs or line breaks. But when they do, they would often be invisible in previous versions of EditPad because most fonts can’t display them. Now the text layout configuration allows you to choose how EditPad should visualize control characters. The options that use letter pairs (like NU for NULL), hexadecimal numbers, or Control+Letter indicators work regardless of the font. Other options like the IBM PC glyphs or Unicode glyphs do depend on the font. The new “Editor: Control characters” color in the color palette allows you to show control characters in a different color or apply an underline or strikeout to mark them as inappropriate for text files.

Tabbing and Indentation

EditPad’s ability to handle different tabbing and indentation styles has been greatly improved. The settings that deal with this have been moved onto a new Tabbing page in the file type configuration. The Tab Characters group has the options that determine the width of a tab. The Indentation group has the options that determine how many spaces or tabs are inserted or removed by Block|Indent and Block|Outdent.

Because other people may have their editors configured differently, you can now specify a regular expression that EditPad should use to detect the tab size. The regex needs to have a capturing group named “tab”. If this matches an integer between 2 and 32, that is taken as the tab size in spaces. Otherwise EditPad counts the number of characters matched by the group and takes that number as the tab size if it is between 2 and 8. If your regex also has a group named “tabspaces” then pressing the Tab key on the keyboard inserts spaces if that group finds a match other than “0”, “false”, “tab”, or “no”.

Turning on “elastic tab stops” makes EditPad dynamically calculate the width of tabs so that columns line up nicely for blocks of lines that have the same number of tabs, requiring only a single tab between the columns. Editing text that is followed by a tab on a particular line automatically adjusts the width of that tab on that line and all adjacent lines that have the at least that many tabs. When tab stops are elastic, the “tab size” setting applies only to tabs at the start of the line (indentation tabs). The “smallest gap between text” is the minimum tab size for other tabs. The key benefit of elastic tab stops is that it allows columns to line up neatly even with proportionally spaced fonts, and they will continue to line up neatly when you change the font or change the tab size. They will also line up neatly for other people, as long as you took care to only use one tab to delimit columns and indent lines only using tabs, and the other people’s editor also uses elastic tab stops.

Turn on “tab-separated values” to show tab-delimited, comma-delimited (CSV), or any-one-character-delimited files with properly aligned columns. You can enter any single character as the value delimiter. That character is then spaced like tab and shown with the color for visualized whitespace. You can also specify a quote and/or an escape character to be able to use the value delimiter within values as well. When you edit the file, the size of the tab that follows the edit is automatically adjusted throughout the entire file to make all the columns line up neatly. EditPad ships with predefined “comma-separated values” and “tab-separated values” file types for .csv and .tsv file types that use these options.

Turn on “keep the same level of indentation when pressing enter” to have the new line indented by the same amount as the previous line. This option was labeled “automatically indent new lines when pressing enter” in previous versions of EditPad. Options|Keep Indent toggles this option for the active file. This menu item was previously labeled Auto Indent. The old “auto indent” feature was renamed to “keep indent” because that more accurately describes what it does.

The Block|Indent and Block|Outdent can now detect the indentation size of text surrounding the block to be indented or outdented. They look at a block of 1,000 lines. If all the lines are indented by tabs, then the indentation size is one tab. If all the lines are indented by a multiple of the same number of spaces, then the indentation size is that number of spaces. Otherwise, the setting from the file type configuration is used.

Editing Large Files

When you open a large file, you can now instantly jump to the end of the file by pressing Ctrl+End on the keyboard or by dragging the scroll bar’s thumb to the bottom. Previously you had to wait for EditPad to scan the whole file for line breaks to be able to access the end of the file. Now you only need to wait if you want to access the middle of the file and you only need to wait half as long. The Cursors page in the Preferences has a new option to place the cursor at the end of the file instead of at the top of the file when opening a file.

Backups and Working Copies

The Save Files page in the Preferences has new options for backups and working copies. Backup copies can now be limited by their total size. When restricting backups by age, backup copies older than a certain number of days are now reduced to one per day and backups older than a certain number of weeks are now reduced to one per week, instead of deleting all backups older than a certain number of days. This allows backups to be kept over a longer period without reaching the limit you set for their size or the number of copies.

If you select to keep multiple backups per file, you can now tell EditPad to automatically save the actual file every few minutes instead of saving a separate working copy. Separate working copies can now be saved in a specific folder or in a subfolder of the folder containing the original. Working copies are now saved when the system goes into standby or hibernation to prevent data loss if the system never resumes from standby or hibernation.

Preferences|Save Files now has separate options for closing files with unsaved changes and closing files that were never saved. This allows untitled files to be saved automatically without prompting. The choice for files with unsaved changes now affects files that were made empty.

Line Break Styles

Previous versions of EditPad already recognized all Unicode line breaks. But the default line break style could only be set to CRLF pairs, LF-only, or CR-only. Now you can set any line break style as the default in the file type configuration. Previously, Ctrl+Enter always inserted a form feed character, which EditPad interprets as a page break. This is still the default. But in the file type configuration you can now select any line break style for Ctrl+Enter.

Previously, the Convert|Windows/UNIX/Mac menu items allowed you to convert between CRLF, LF-only, and CR-only line breaks. These commands left all other line breaks untouched. They have been replaced with a new Convert|Line Break Style menu item. When you select it you get a popup dialog that tells you how many line breaks of each style, including all the Unicode styles, your file contains. You can tick the line break styles you want to convert, and untick those you want to leave alone. You can select any line break style that you want to convert the selected styles to. This allows you to easily deal with errant line break styles in your file. You can still do the old Windows/UNIX/Mac conversion by selecting only CRLF, LF, and CR line breaks to be converted and selecting CRLF, LF, or CR as the new line break style.

The Convert|Line Break Style also allows you to select which line breaks are inserted by the Enter and Ctrl+Enter keys. You can select any line break style for these, regardless of which line breaks your file already contains. For the Enter key you can also choose “automatic” which is the old behavior of using the file’s dominant line break style. Line break style detection is now done whenever you insert or delete lines, possibly changing the status bar indicator and the line break style used by the Enter key if you choose the “automatic” option.

Other Improvements

Files with paths longer than 260 characters are now opened and saved correctly. Previously EditPad acted as if such files did not exist.

Go|Go to Position replaces Go|Go to Line. In addition to moving the cursor to a specific line, you can now also move it to a specific column or move it to a specific byte offset. There are also options for selecting the text between the old and new cursor positions or expanding the existing selection to the new cursor position.

Extra|Sort Alphanumerically replaces Extra|Sort Alphabetically. Text that contains numbers now sorts the numbers as a whole, instead of sorting each digit separately. “A4” now comes before “A10” because 4 is less than 10.

Go|Back/Forward in Editing Position renamed from Previous/Next Editing Position to make it more obvious that these commands use chronological order like the Back/Forward in Edited Files commands and unlike the other Next/Previous commands.

Regular Expressions

EditPad’s regular expression syntax has been extended to support the newest features from other regex flavors. EditPad 8 uses exactly the same regex flavor as PowerGREP 5.

The Search toolbar now has a button labeled “Free” that enables free-spacing regular expressions.

EditPad now supports balancing groups like the .NET regex flavor and branch reset groups like Perl and PCRE. Also new is character class intersection using the [class&&[intersect]] syntax like Java and Ruby. The nested pair of square brackets is required. EditPad does not support the [class&&intersect] syntax as this could lead people to write [class&&intersect&&again] which behaves unpredictably in Java and Ruby.

In Perl and PCRE you can use \K to keep text out of the match to work around their restrictions on lookbehind. While \K is not really needed in EditPad with its unrestricted lookbehind, you can now use \K in EditPad like you would in Perl or PCRE if you are used to writing your regexes that way.

Perl, PCRE, and Ruby all support regular expression recursion and subroutines. These three have largely copied each others syntax, resulting in multiple ways to write recursion and subroutines. But these three have not copied each others matching behavior, resulting in clear behavioral differences despite the similar syntax. EditPad provides three sets of syntax for recursion and subroutine calls. Each set of syntax follows the matching behavior of one of these three flavors. Like in PCRE, (?P>name) does not capture, reverts capturing groups, and is atomic. You can remember this syntax by its similarity to that of atomic groups. Unlike PCRE, EditPad also supports (?P>1) and (?P>0) so you can specify this behavior for a numbered call and for recursion. Like in Perl, (?R), (?1), and (?&name) do not capture, revert capturing groups, and allow backtracking. You can remember this syntax by the ampersand that is used in &subroutine(); calls in Perl code. Finally, like in Ruby, \g<0>, \g<1>, and \g<name> capture the match of the subroutine call, do not revert capturing groups, and allow backtracking. You can remember this syntax by the fact that Ruby’s regex flavor does not support any other syntax for recursion and subroutine calls.

\h is a new shorthand character class for horizontal whitespace. It includes spaces, tabs, and all Unicode whitespace except line and paragraph breaks. \v used to be an escape that matches the vertical tab. Now \v is a shorthand for vertical whitespace. This includes the vertical tab, line breaks, page breaks, and paragraph breaks. \v matches CR and LF separately. \H and \V are the negated versions of these two new shorthands.

\R is a new special escape that matches any line break, including Unicode line breaks. What makes it special is that it treats CRLF pairs as indivisible. It matches CR and LF on their own when they occur in the subject string on their own. But when the subject string contains CRLF as a sequence, \R matches the entire CRLF pair.

\l and \u are now shorthands for \p{Ll} and \p{Lu}. These match any Unicode lowercase or uppercase character. These tokens are always case sensitive.

POSIX classes using the notation [[:alpha:]] now match only ASCII characters. The \p{Alpha} notation still matches Unicode characters. [[:d:]], [[:s:]], [[:w:]], [[:l:]], and [[:u:]] are now shorthands for [[:digit:]], [[:space:]], [[:word:]], [[:lower:]], and [[:upper:]]. You can treat them as ASCII-only versions of \d, \s, \w, \l, and \u.

\i and \c are now XML shorthand character classes. \cA through \cZ are no longer supported as control character escapes.

Octal escapes must now be written as \o{377}. The octal number can range from \o{0} to \o{177777}. The old \0377 syntax is now an error. EditPad has never supported \377 as that is too confusing with the syntax for backreferences. \0 too is now an error, instead of matching a literal zero. Use \x00 to match NULL bytes.

Replacement Strings

EditPad’s replacement string syntax has been extended with replacement string conditionals to make this possible. (?1matched:unmatched) and ${1:+matched:unmatched} insert matched if the first capturing group participated in the match or unmatched if it did not. Just like conditionals in the regular expression, a capturing group that finds a zero-length match is considered to have participated. The first syntax is borrowed from Boost. The second from PCRE2. When using named capturing groups, you can use (?{name}matched:unmatched) and ${name:+matched:unmatched} to reference them in replacement string conditionals. You can use the full replacement string syntax inside a conditional, including nested conditionals. Conditionals that reference non-existing groups are an error. If you want to insert the text captured by the group when it participated and something else when it did not, you can use ${group:-unmatched}.

As a consequence of adding this syntax, EditPad 8 treats \?, \:, \(, \), \{, and \} as escaped characters that insert one of these six punctuation characters literally. EditPad 7 and prior treated these as literal backslashes, inserting both the backslash and the following punctuation character literally into the replacement.