My goal with Reggy from the beginning was to be simple and not look like junk. There are many other regular expression testers out there. If you like them, use them. I happen to think many of them look like dirt. Reggy may not be gorgeous, but it’s certainly not dirt either.

The first implementation of coloring was actually by a volunteer (Justin Bakse) who was nice enough to pass the code back to me to look over. It was a good start for sure. But it used an implementation that I just don’t want — for simplicity’s sake: you pick X amount of colors, then for each match the code picks one of the colors, then the next and so on, repeating. This is visually distinctive if you pick a bunch of crazy colors, but I am still thinking that picking 10 colors in the preferences is not the Mac experience I want to provide for people.

My implementation looks like this:

// Add new color to matched ranges
bool countUp = YES;
float r,g,b,a;
[[NSUnarchiver unarchiveObjectWithData:[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@”match_color”]] getRed:&r green:&g blue:&b alpha:&a];
for ( unsigned int i = 0; i < [matchedRanges count]; i++ )
{
    NSRange thisRange = NSRangeFromString([matchedRanges objectAtIndex:i]);

    // Generate new color from base color
    if ( i > 0 && [[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] boolForKey:@”color_submatches”] )
    {
        if ( r > 0.8 || g > 0.8 || b > 0.8 ) countUp = NO;
        if ( r < 0.0 || g < 0.0 || b < 0.0 ) countUp = YES;

        if ( countUp ) { r += 0.2; g += 0.2; b += 0.2; } else { r -= 0.2; g -= 0.2; b -= 0.2; }
    }

    [[testingStringField textStorage] addAttribute:NSForegroundColorAttributeName value:[NSColor colorWithCalibratedRed:r green:g blue:b alpha:a] range:thisRange];
}

Pretty simple I think. Get the color components of the match string color preference (r, g, b, a). Then for every match other than the first match, increment each RGB component by 20% (this is a 0 to 1 scale) or decrement depending on the component values. I came out with 0.8 as a maximum value by just testing a bunch of different match colors and found 0.8 to be around the acceptable range of readability against a white background for most colors. The increment or decrement step value of 0.2 was another value I just played around with until there was a good balance between having each color step look different, yet still provide a small enough value so as to allow as many steps as possible between 0 and 1.

If anyone has a more elegant solution, please propose it. I am not a genius, I just know what I like. And I don’t like having to pick a bunch of colors. I like the simplicity of using one color with differing brightness as it still seems that the user has control over the coloring, but maybe I could go for a color generation scheme that is based on color theories like complements or triads. Or maybe I am the only one that is this picky?

_Screenshots_

Enjoy