Release Notes for Notepad2 5.0.26-beta4 (released October 28, 2012)
Release Notes for Notepad2 5.0.26-beta3 (released October 27, 2012)

Notepad2 can do some more fancy automated magic (all of this is
optional, and can be disabled). Some additional processing of files not
recognized to be encoded in UTF-16 or UTF-8 is performed to detect the
(8-bit) encoding. This may fail in many cases and still require manual
recoding, but should work well enough for usual files with some
real-world, non-ASCII text right at the top (for performance reasons,
files are analyzed up to a certain limit). The detection algorithm is a
bit "Windows-centric", and won't work well for OEM, ISO and Mac
encodings. The appropriate option to disable this feature can be found
in File, Encoding, Default. Also, the file indent settings can be
guessed on loading, i.e. whether to use tabs or spaces for indent, and
the tab width in case indent is based on spaces. This feature can be
enabled in the Tab Settings (Ctrl+T).

When loading large files, a warning message is always displayed for
files of a size > 64 MB, regardless whether the large file threshold has
been modified in the ini-file, or the option not to show the warning
message again has been set. Also, the low memory checks when loading and
saving large files have been refined, to prevent damage to the original
files. The Notepad2 FAQ [1] harbors a note to explain why editing large
files with Notepad2 is discouraged.


Release Notes for Notepad2 5.0.26-beta2 (released September 30, 2012)

Notepad2 now internally always works in UTF-8 mode. This improves
clipboard usability, as non-ANSI characters will no longer be replaced
with ?'s on pasting in ANSI mode. Loss of data can still happen if
non-ANSI text is saved to an ANSI-encoded file, but Notepad2 already
used to issue a warning for that case, suggesting to save the file again
with another encoding. Also, there's a new warning message on saving if
an encoding tag is detected that does not match the current file
encoding.

The usability of the Most Recently Used (MRU) lists for files and search
strings has been improved, as MRU lists are now shared memory objects
that can be accessed by and are synchronized between all running
instances of Notepad2. There's an ini-file option to turn off this
behavior. The dialog boxes that make use of MRU lists have new options
to clear all items.

The hotkey for "Reset Zoom" has been remapped to the more common
combination Ctrl+0, and "Transparent Mode" was moved to Ctrl+/. The new
Ctrl+* hotkey can be used to toggle text selection between "stream"
(continuous) and "block" (rectangular) mode (thanks to Juan Moncada for
this suggestion).

There's two new settings that can be tweaked though the Notepad2
ini-file. "StickyBOM" specifies whether empty files (i.e. with
zero-length text) should be saved with a byte order mark (UTF-16 BOM,
UTF-16 BE BOM, or UTF-8 Signature) if applicable, or just as a
zero-length file. Note that empty files are treated as if they have a
byte order mark, in case the default encoding set in Notepad2 also has a
byte order mark. "OffsetNewWindows" determines whether positions of new
windows (opened through Alt+N or Alt+0) should be offset relative to the
active Notepad2 window, the new default setting is to use the same
position as the currently active Notepad2 window.


Release Notes for Notepad2 5.0.26-beta1 (released September 07, 2012)

The most important change is that text selection is now restored after
undo and redo operations. The Scintilla editing control itself decently
adapts text selection after most built-in operations, i.e. if two lines
are partially selected and then indented by hitting tab, the selection
is extended to fully include the two affected lines. But when undoing
the indentation, Scintilla drops any selection and just moves the caret
to the last point where it has modified the text buffer. Notepad2 also
used to work like this, but is now able to restore the selection after
performing the undo step. In analogy to Scintilla's adaptation of the
selection, Notepad2 also expands the selection to include all the text
affected by the operation being undone. In the example above, the two
lines will be fully (and not only partially) selected on undo. This
simplifies navigation within the undo/redo history. The behaviour of
selection restoration after undo and redo operations can be customized
in the ini-file, see FAQ [1] for more explanations.

The default extension for saved files has been changed from no extension
to .txt, and the Notepad2 FAQ [1] explains how to specify a custom
default extension.

The open and save dialogs use the following steps (consistently across
all versions of Windows) to determine the initial directory: if a file
is opened, the path to that file is used; otherwise, the default
directory specified in the ini-file (see Notepad2 FAQ [1]) is used; or,
if no default directory is set, the last directory where a file was
opened or saved from the file dialogs is used (the directory is not
remembered if the file dialogs were cancelled). The initial directory
for the file dialogs the first time after launching Notepad2 is the
working directory of Notepad2.exe. The remembered directory will be
discarded after closing Notepad2.

There's an additional option for the file change notification to display
a title bar indicator without popping up any message boxes if a file has
been modified outside of Notepad2.

The update to Scintilla 3.2.2 introduces significant performance
improvements with the display of long lines. Selecting lines by clicking
the left editor margin has been enhanced to allow selection of wrapped
(display) sublines with single clicks, and whole (physical) lines with
double clicks. There's various minor updates and simplifications to
syntax schemes and keywords, of which Perl scheme support for embedded
variables is probably worth mentioning.

With Scintilla 3.2.2, Notepad2 now uses Direct2D and DirectWrite instead
of Windows GDI for drawing on Windows Vista or newer. This can be
disabled in the ini-file. Note that some fonts, such as "Fixedsys", may
no longer be supported by Direct2D. Scintilla now accepts fractional
font sizes for syntax styles (i.e. "size:8.75"), but these have to be
set manually in the Customize Schemes dialog, as the Windows Font Dialog
only allows selection of integral font sizes. And, there's a new
"semi-bold" attribute, but note that not all fonts support the semi bold
weight.

Two important bugs have been fixed that caused Notepad2 to truncate
existing files on saving (overwriting) if there was not enough free disk
space, or not enough free memory. Many thanks to Marek Retych, Tom Doan
and Alex Mojzes for reporting these problems. And, thanks to ddimegen,
another bug has been fixed that caused improper detection of certain
UTF-16 LE files with LE-BOM as UTF-16 BE.

Notepad2 works again on Windows XP prior to Service Pack 3, many thanks
to the people who reported this issue and helped with testing the fix.


[1] http://www.flos-freeware.ch/doc/notepad2-FAQs.html