One of the most popular features in HomeSite was “Extended Search and Replace,” which enabled searching and replacing blocks of text across multiple files. I remember hearing from countless customers who used HomeSite for this feature alone.
Pretty much every text editor had a similar feature, but HomeSite’s was really easy to use, and it was extremely fast. So it was no surprise when TopStyle customers who had switched from HomeSite requested the same feature in TopStyle.
I partially addressed this in TopStyle 3.10 by adding “Find in Files” (Shift+Ctrl+F), which improved upon HomeSite’s “Extended Search” by adding regular expression matching. But as nice as this feature was, it only searched files. The lack of similar replace feature has been a sore spot for some TopStyle users (including myself, to be honest).
So today I finally buckled down and added an “Extended Replace” feature to TopStyle 3.5 which makes HomeSite’s look childish by comparison. You can do things like:
- Replace only if the text occurs outside of an HTML tag
- Replace only in files that have been modified in a specific date range
- Replace only in files that have not been modified in a specific date range
- Include or exclude files based on their extension
- Save your search/replace operations so you can repeat them later
Here’s a screenshot of how it looks so far:
