@Vitalii-Dovgan said in Search++: A work in progress:
My next suggestion may ruin one of the initial purposes of Search++, but maybe you’ll find it useful anyway? Here it is: the “icudt78.dll” is a big DLL with a size of 32 MB, and when I think about a portable version of Notepad++, I usually consider a portable and small version of Notepad++. Correspondingly, what do you think about an attempt to load the “icudt78.dll” at runtime and if it is not available then just disable the “ICU” button and allow the rest of the plugin to operate normally?
Regex search also depends on ICU, so I can’t really make it optional.
One of the major “under the hood” changes I made when I built Search++ based on the search in Columns++ was to use ICU for all the Unicode properties instead of the rather hacked-together approach I used in Columns++. The underlying engine in both search in Columns++ and Regex search in Search++ is Boost.Regex, with a considerable amount of customization to make it work well with Scintilla and with Unicode.
I’m really hesitant to reverse that, as the ICU properties are more accurate and easier to update when Unicode releases new versions, while the Columns++ approach is tricky and a bit fragile, and still doesn’t get everything right.
However, as you note, it does increase the size: that one dll is over six times the size of the plugin dll. It also appears that the current version of the ICU4C dll files (at least the pre-compiled ones) don’t work on Windows 7 (and presumably Windows 8).
So… I suppose it’s possible that at some point I’ll try to undo the use of ICU and go back to the cobbled-together approach, but this time get it right. I can’t hold out hope that it will happen soon, nor promise that it will happen at all.
Edit to add:
I included the ICU search mostly for testing. ICU’s native search doesn’t integrate well with Scintilla, and it lacks some of the syntax familiar to Notepad++ users from Boost.Regex. Since I haven’t manipulated its search process at all, results from ICU searches can serve as a check on whether Regex is properly implemented (allowing for expected/intentional differences). I might remove it before Search++ comes out of pre-release status; but @guy038 has expressed hope that I will leave it in, so it will probably remain, perhaps hidden in some way.
