best REGEXP friendly Text Editors + most powerful REGEXP syntax?

Question

I am fluent with Microsoft Visual 2005 regular expressions and they are a big time saver.

I seem to learn them best by having a vaguely organized cheat sheet thrown at me, at which point I read just a little and play with them until I understand what's going on. That learning approach has worked well for me, for now.

I would really like to take this to the next level though. Basically --

1. What is the REGEXP convention that is generally regarded as the most open-ended and powerful? VS2005 Regexps seem kind of gimped, so maybe I'm a kid playing in a sandbox.

2. Are there text editors out there that can perform a highlight all matches, list lines containing string, or some kind of powerful function like that in conjunction with the very strongest REGEXP language? If not I can just use multiple programs and a weird technique but I'd like to avoid that.

I wonder if a stronger REGEXP language or a "stronger" regEXP writer might be able to have his search match all results on all lines even by clicking a "find next" by adding some simple criteria to the search.

Anyway, please provide advice!

Answer 1

Most real languages have a similar regex implementations, and there really is none better than the other.

AFAIK there is no such thing as a "regex editor" -- that would be silly. Learn the implementation of whatever language you are using to perfection and don't rely on silly computers to know what you want.

Answer 2

Regex Buddy

I've never used it myself, but I hear a lot of praise.

Answer 3

The best text editor as far as regex support is concerned, is EditPadPro, by Jan Goyvaerts, creator of RegexBuddy, PowerGREP and RegexMagic, author of regular-expressions.info and co-author of the Regular Expressions Cookbook.

It uses regular expressions for many things, including syntax highlighting, code folding, file type detection and more, and is therefore very powerful and highly customizable. The other editor I love, UltraEdit, has a decent regex engine, too, but it's no match to the JGSoft engine, and it's only half-heartedly implemented. No syntax highlighting by regex, for example.

The JGSoft engine is currently the regex engine that supports the most features regexes have to offer, see this comparison table. Notably absent is support for recursive pattern matching like .NET and PCRE provide, but Jan Goyvaerts said that this is planned for a later release.

Of course, RegexBuddy integrates seamlessly into EditPadPro, so you can get both - an editor with (among other things) perfect regex support, and an excellent regex editor.

And by the way, a mobile version of EPP for installation on a USB drive is included in the price of the desktop version (same thing with RegexBuddy et al.).