Free Windows GUI text editor supporting Regular Expressions, for programmers? [closed]

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Looking for a free Windows GUI text editor that supports solid¹ regular expressions for its Find/Replace features, for programmers to use.

Familiar with Vim, Ed, Emacs, etc. Not looking for a command-based editor. Will give chosen editor to team members already familiar with Regular Expressions, but don't want learning curve incurred to use the editor itself.

1: "solid" meaning: the newest syntax or features implemented.

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The Zeus Lite editor implements a Perl style of regular expression and it is free.

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Notepad RE (PCRE regex support) and Programmers Notepad (PERL regex support) have both worked out really well for me. The former is a good replacement for Notepad.

Notepad++ is useful for less complex regular expressions.

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EditPadLite 7 (the free-for-non-commercial-use scaled-down version of EditpadPro) now provides regex search and replace.

It uses JGSoft's very powerful regex engine.

Edit 2012-03-12 Notepad++ is a very popular free editor, but in the past did not have powerful regex (so I have never really used it). However, as of version 6, it now incorporates the very powerful and stable PCRE regex library. Although I'm a die-hard EditPadPro user, I may need to take a second look...

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EditPad Pro seems to have it all. Although commercial, you can try for free.

As a free alternative, I use ConTEXT from time to time when I'm on Windows. Although it does not support look-arounds, almost all other PCRE features are supported. It's a nice lightweight text editor with tons of syntax highlighters available.

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Here's an answer in the negative (and only a year late):

There are certain editors which are very good in many respects, but that have very poor support for regular expressions: "SciTE", "Programmer's Notepad" a "Notepad++" (which are all free). These are all based on the "Scintilla" library, which has a regex engine that does not even support alternation.

Hence, if regexes are important to you, then you should probably avoid those.

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I've tried a lot of the suggested programs listed above, but to date the only free text editor I've found that has robust support (i.e., no bugs, almost all functionality) for regular expressions is jEdit.

All the others have some wierd limitation one way or the other, like the inability to search for newlines.

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Take a look at notepad++, which is free and supports all kinds of regexy goodness.

Get the PortableApps version and you can keep it on a keydrive all the time -- handy for a mobile dev platform.

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I was looking for a free text GUI text editor with full or comprehensive regex support (including lookahead/lookbehind assertions) AND the ability to search across multiple files. Zeus Lite has support but it froze with a very large set of files. For my GUI text editor needs, there's a bevy out there. When I'm searching through a very large set of files with comprehensive regex support and I want a FREE program, I use TextCrawler.

TestCrawler is NOT a GUI text editor, but for my needs, it serves a complimentary role to your GUI text editor of choice.

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Another good one that I use - I like it better than notepad++ and ConTEXT - is PSPad It has a great set of features and can load larger files than notepad++.

A REALLY fully featured light-weight editor that I use to replace notepad - but has many of the features of PSPad including regular expression search is Notepad2

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I have often used regex find/replace in Netbeans in the past. It can handle multiple files (filenames can be specified by regexp too!)