ViRE – Regex You Can Read

Purchased the lifetime subscription because it’s almost perfect and the most outstanding visual regular expression environment available for macOS & iPadOS at the time of this writing. Extremely grateful for the developer taking the time to create ViRE because although every other RegEx app in the MAS are productively useful they lack the contextual visual ease of use that ViRE possess! Wishlist: • Enable the “Send a copy” icon on toolbar to share (Airdrop/DropBox/GoogleDrive/iCloud, etc.) selected text results or RegEx scripts to other apps and to allow bidirectional transfer between ViRE iPadOS/macOS or add an Import/Export to external file, menu option. The current contextual menu activated on selections in ViRE macOS doesn’t show access to all these features like ViRE iPadOS does in my use case.• Optionally show invisible characters hidden within imported text.• Also include a regular expression dictionary or glossary panel to reference richer description details of meta characters (although the contextual autocomplete is a must have it also blocks the imported text from view while you’re thinking and scrolling through it).• Add deeper descriptive syntax error notices.• Add your support link to the help menu in macOS (It’s extremely easy to forget that it’s available only in the MAS for ViRE).• Also include ViRE introduction steps under the help menu (in case I’d like to remove them from the ViRE history to reduce clutter for future projects).• Consider adding additional syntax formats in the future (ecma script{javascript}, python, C#, etc.).

If you are already familiar with Regex this app actually makes your own Regex harder to understand especially if you are familiar with the syntax. The "long" horizontal scrolling is actually very annoying. It might have been better with a tree style stacked view with no horizontal scrolling. It may be useful for someone trying to learn Regex and then justify the monthly or yearly subscription fee. For seasonsed Regex users one time payment apps like Expressions, Patterns are actually more useful to write and test Regex!

This app came up really handy when I needed to search and replace various data formats in my customer roster to include social media accounts and contact details. It was easy to work with the large number of files at once and keep each phase as a separate editable step. There are not so many apps like this for iPad users and so I really appreciate the authenticity.