¹ Any purchases of FileLocator Pro v7 made since Jan 2015 are guaranteed a free upgrade to v8.
By explaining to us how FileLocator Pro and Agent Ransack work for you (and where they could do better) we’ll know how to ease that niggle – and allow you to get on with what you do best. If you have any ideas about how we can improve the product to make your life a little bit easier, then drop us a line. To be honest, I had really hoped FileLocator Pro v8 would have been released in 2015 but the good news is that it’s very close. Perl compatible syntax Perl compatible regexp syntax is based around the Boost regular expression engine and includes not only the functionality of the classic regular expression engine but also additional Perl style. So, as we finalize features for FileLocator Pro Version 8 release¹ (currently scheduled for September 2015) we are reminded that the best way of improving our products is to make sure we learn from you about how you use them. So what’s going to be the highlight of 2016 I wonder Well, it’s easy FileLocator Pro version 8 It’s been a long time in the making, the first prototyping of one of the new features goes back to 2011. FileLocator Pro provides extensive regular expression support using either a Perl compatible syntax or a classic syntax.
We are consistently bowled over by the myriad of ways the software is being used to resolve your problems ways we never would have thought of, in industries we have little knowledge of. As a company we know how we use the software, but we are increasingly aware you often use it differently. Great, right? Yes, but with one small problem. Agent Ransack was downloaded by thousands of people and over the years thousands more have downloaded it and its big brother FileLocator Pro. It turned out that I was not the only one that needed a fast, easy to use, search program. So, over the next few weekends I polished up the UI, gave it a more exciting name (which I know not everyone appreciates) and finally released it on the Internet (via ZDNet). It not only worked, it was REALLY fast.ĭuring the process I’d noticed something else, I was using FileLocator to help me navigate through my source code. I found one by a guy named Henry Spencer and plugged that into my search framework.
And it worked!įeeling really pleased with myself I had a look on the Internet for other regex engines and realized that there were some MUCH better implementations. However, to really test it out I needed a framework to throw lots of data at it so I created a basic C++ application (initially called FileLocator) that would run through all the source files on my computer and match it against the regex engine. However, on larger searches it can be confusing because it appears to show the search going past. This has the advantage of being able to show accurate search progress for step 2, and works well for smaller searches. After reading an article by Brian Kernighan (co-father of C and Unix) in 1999 on regular expressions I decided to play around with my own regex engine. FileLocator Pro has always defaulted to a two phase search process, step 1 collect the file list, step 2 search the file list. If I’m honest Agent Ransack was an accident.