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🌈 grepc 1.3.0: more features, more problems

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Well, well, well… if it’s not another release notes? Looks like I finally had enough changes to justify a release.

But wait, we were on the front page of VS Code Marketplace!

AND WE HIT 15,000 INSTALLS!

Thank you all for supporting this project :). I can’t express how grateful I am that so many people choose to use this extension.

So what’s new in this release?

New Features

Before and After attachments!

Edit / Import Mode!

Export Rules to JSON!

Debug Mode!

Look at that cute little checkbox. (No one is going to use this feature besides me…)

Metrics

I wanted to start publishing some of the metrics that are part of having a VS Code Extension as I find this to be quite intriguing. VS Marketplace provides developers with a small but interesting set of tools to see how their extension is being adopted.

As you can see in the graph above, we had a major boost in page views (the line) since being feature on the front page of the marketplace. Our acquisition has also significantly increased since that day with 200~ installs a day.

We did receive a rather unusual spike of 14k installs on one day in particular. I am not quite sure what caused this traffic (botting, extension pack, someone installing it across company). Regardless, it is a warm welcome.

Full Release Notes

Notes

  • With the advent of VSC 1.92+, to drag and drop between webviews you must hold shift.

Added

  • Introduced 3 new minimize commands: All, local, and global.
  • Added debug setting for showing rule states.
  • Introduce before and after decoration states with corresponding UX.
  • Introduced new webview actions:
    • Minimize all rules
    • Edit Mode. Raw editing of the rules.
    • Export rules to clipboard

Changed

  • Addressed bug where disabled rules would apply if editing document.
  • Fixed UX bug with occurrence drop down.
  • Fixed broken license badge in release notes view.

Removed

  • Removed all non-contextual commands from context. (i.e. Only create rule from selection appears on right click).and more. As always, see the full changelog below.

grepc – Release Notes v1.2.0

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Yesterday marked the release of version 1.2.0 for grepc.

This is the biggest update to come to the extension and features a lot of new content and performance improvements. This update includes overhauls of decoration systems resulting in huge performance improvements, multi-editor highlighting, in-line change support, drag-n-drop overhaul and support, and much more. I am very excited to announce this release as it amounts to 2 months of work since the last major release. I think in the future, I’ll push updates more often…

What is grepc? grepc is a free, open-source extension for VS Code that allows advanced highlighting via regular expressions and intuitive interfaces.

I highly recommend checking out the marketplace page if you are unfamiliar with the extension.

I made this extension for my own use and wanted to provide a polished and complete tool for others to use as well. I don’t expect any income from this project, and I will never monetize any aspect of it; I simply want to provide a tool that I have wanted for years in my own workflow to others in hopes it helps people with their day to day. And who doesn’t want more color in their editor?

Check out the new features below or click the link above to easily install. Interested in the GitHub? Click here. Feel free to report issues or contribute if you’re interested.

New Features

Multi-editor support!

Drag & drop to transfer between workspace rules and global rules

drag-transfer

Release Notes!

Walkthrough

Full Release Notes

Added

  • Decoration System Overhaul!
    • Multiple editor support introduced.
    • Significant performance improvements.
    • In-line changes update decorations.
    • Occurrence updates only occur when needed.
    • Context retention is enabled for webviews.
  • Drag n Drop rules from workspace to global and vice versa!
    • It was a struggle to get this working, including some crazy race conditions in TS (see the boolean lock in ruleFactory…)
    • In a later story, we can move this to be a proper mutex lock.
  • Introduced a release notes page that shows on any major or minor update. (Simply type grepc: Show Release Notes to see the update)
  • Introduced a walkthrough for grepc.
  • Added appropriate support for multi-line regex.
  • Added more badges to the README.
  • Introduced prettier and eslint for the codebase.
  • Improved unit tests.

Changed

  • Updated icon for marketplace and README to appropriate 128×128 and larger icon size.
  • Updated displayName to more accurately reflect what extension does.
  • Refactored previous drag n drop to use HTML drag and drop instead of mouse events. Obligatory
    • This took me… a lot of time.

Removed

  • getRulesArray() does not have side effects anymore 🙂

What’s Coming Next?

  • Support adding text before and after a match
  • More context options such as minimizing all rules
  • Support decorating captured groups (this will be a big feature)
  • Import and exporting of rules
  • Bug fixes and more community support

Shout out to @cheljur for their contributions to the project and manual testing.

Shout out to @daeh for reporting issues with the extension.

Interested in contributing? Reach out to @stneveadomi on GitHub and view the source code at the GitHub repository.

Want to help? Share the extension with your friends.

Tricky Code #1

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Starting this series to describe code blocks that have tricked me at some point. Whether this be syntactic sugar gone bad or my own negligence, I hope to enlighten with these posts.

In the below code, we have a simple while-loop that sets x to the index of the first instance of the integer 5. If it doesn’t find 5, x will equal nums.length. If it does find 5, x will equal the index of 5 in nums.

int x = 0;
int[] nums = {0, 5};

while(x < nums.length && nums[x] != 5)
{
    x++;
}

System.out.println("x = " + x);

Given this code, we would expect the program to print “x = 1”.

And this is exactly what happens… but let’s try some other examples.

int x = 0;
int[] nums = {0, 3};

while(x < nums.length && nums[x] != 5)
{
    x++;
}

System.out.println("x = " + x);

Here, the program will not find 5 in the array and print “x = 2”.

Now, let’s say we want to make this code shorter. Let’s move the x++ into the while condition.

int x = 0;
int[] nums = {0, 3};

while(x < nums.length && nums[x++] != 5);

System.out.println("x = " + x);

Note that we moved the post-increment operator into the index operator.

And what do we get when we print this?

“x = 2”

That seems right!
But let’s try another example

int x = 0;
int[] nums = {0, 3, 5};

while(x < nums.length && nums[x++] != 5);

System.out.println("x = " + x);

Here, we would expect the program to print “x = 2”.

BUT it prints “x = 3”

Why is this?

This is because the post increment is in the check! Regardless of if the check is true or false, the increment will occur!

//So basically

while(x < nums.length && nums[x] != 5)
{
    x++;
}

//does not equal

while(x < nums.length && nums[x++] != 5);