Question

I’m looking for a text editor in win7/ubuntu which has good regex support. I’ve tried a few which have partial support or seem to use a custom syntax, so I’m looking for a program which has full support and no/little custom style regex. For example, I’m trying to execute the following exp against some text:

^((?!test).)*$

to find lines without the word test in. I’ve tested this in various online tools and I think the reg exp is sound, but i can’t find a text editor which I can use/trust.

Answer 1

Vim has regex support but the pattern syntax is a bit different:

/\(\(test\)\@!.\)*$

You can make it less obscure by turning on the verymagic setting:

/\v((test)@!.)*$

read :help pattern.

Also note that this pattern matches est and following characters just after the last occurrence of test on a line, or whole lines containing no occurrence of test. Is that what you want?

If you don’t know vim, you should probably start with vimtutor. Vim is not designed for user friendliness, and has a steep learning curve.