Patterns - The Regex App 4+

Text captured by round brackets needs different color

I was looking for a decent replacement for the now old age RegExhibit which I use for years. Patterns seems competent at first glance, but it has a few annoyances. First and foremost the author really needs to provide different highlight colors for captured text (color, underline, whatever - preferably configurable through a preferences dialog, like RegExhibit). Like it is, it becomes difficult to know wether a particular regex with some text captures is actually working, because the captures are highlighted the same as the whole text match. Second, the author needs to provide this for replacements, meaning all replaced text should be highlighted with a specific configurable color - so that we can easily check at a glance all replaced text. The third issue I found was with the Reference Sheet, which scrolls very very slowly (latest Snow Leopard here).

Without these three major annoyances (especially the captured text highlight issue), this will be a suitable replacement for my age old RegExhibit. Will edit this review and provide a better rating when/if this gets implementend. As it is, I really have to go back to RegExhibit in order to keep my mental sanity while working with more complex regexs.

EDIT for version 1.0.1: the Reference Sheet scrolling issue was fixed in this version, but the major annoyance of not being able to see captured text with a different color still wasn't...