abareplace
Doom Running on a Regex Engine
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @04:47AM (#48105793)
I continue to work on Aba Search and Replace, a tool for regex search and quick conversions (Base64, URL encoding, JSON Web tokens, timestamps to dates and vice versa). https://www.abareplace.com/
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
on Tuesday April 14, 2026 @11:26AM (#47766898)
I continue to add more features to my search-and-replace tool for Windows (https://www.abareplace.com/). I initially built in for myself and it was one of the first incremental grep implementations (allowing you to see the results as you are typing the search pattern). Now it supports various formats like Base64, URL encoding, or timestamp conversions. With one-liners, you can add width/height attributes to <img> tags or insert file contents.
Are We Anti-AI?
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)
on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @08:38AM (#46959581)
I'm working on a regex / data conversion tool for web developers: https://www.abareplace.com
Plan to add more handy features in the next version.
Re:More Mac malware from Google search
on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @03:58AM (#46957036)
Agreed, the lack of borders or indentation on the screenshots is very confusing. It's hard to understand what text comes from the malicious website and what is from the author.
On coding with LLMs
Re:Why is the Gmail app 700 MB?
on Thursday January 08, 2026 @07:31AM (#46540293)
Is it for iOS? Then, it could be the Swift runtime library.
Reflections on My Tech Career: Microsoft, Valve, and Google
Re:The Rise of Whatever
on Saturday July 05, 2025 @03:20PM (#44474878)
Eevee is she, not he. See the website footer and the home page.
Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
on Thursday July 03, 2025 @02:21PM (#44457826)
https://www.abareplace.com/
An old-school regex and text processing tool for web developers. Great for browsing source code, automating complex replacements, and decoding Base64, URL encoding, or Unix timestamps from your clipboard.
Re:Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
on Thursday May 15, 2025 @06:55AM (#43993692)
It helps to start blogging about things that are related to your product or interesting to your target audience. I got the first users by writing about text-processing tasks that you can do with regular expressions: https://www.abareplace.com/blog/
Re:Notepad++ is 21 years old
on Tuesday November 05, 2024 @03:14PM (#42054784)
Exactly, not loading the whole file into memory works well only for hex editors.
Re:AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted
on Thursday October 10, 2024 @04:03PM (#41802930)
Yep. BitBlt originally used complex 16-bit "operation codes" that store the binary operations in reverse Polish notation. Then, they added "operation index" that stores the same information in a byte, like in Amiga, which is shorter and more elegant. The coding is now redundant because each raster operation code contains both an operation index and an operation code. See https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180528-00/?p=98...
Re:Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @11:33AM (#41501812)
If there is no application manifest, you will get Windows NT4 / Windows 9x style buttons. Just tested this on Windows 11.
Re:The "email is authentication" pattern
on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @04:19AM (#41498460)
booking.com natively supports this "email is authentication" pattern, so you even don't have to change your password and come up with a throw-away password. They just send you a link by email, you click the link, and you are logged in.
Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
on Monday July 01, 2024 @09:37AM (#40845759)
No, they won't get dark mode and this is the biggest problem for Win32 UIs now. If Microsoft would make dark mode available for classic Win32 apps, it would meet all requirements of the original poster.
Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
on Monday July 01, 2024 @09:16AM (#40845583)
Check out the Scrollbars series from Raymond Chen:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030731-00/?p=43...
https://github.com/mity/old-new-win32api?tab=readme-ov-file#...
Re:Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful
on Monday July 01, 2024 @08:53AM (#40845365)
My app is around 500 KB (not megabytes) and it supports dark mode (see https://www.abareplace.com/). So this is definitely possible without using Electron or bloated GUI libraries.
Re:A Hex Editor for Reverse Engineers
on Sunday June 30, 2024 @06:39AM (#40836374)
Unfortunately, it does not load under Firefox
Re:Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?
on Thursday March 28, 2024 @05:53AM (#39849266)
I'm working on a bulk search-and-replace tool for webmasters and developers that allows you to correct errors on your webpages, add width/height attributes to <img tags, convert all method names to lowercase/uppercase, insert a header with the filename and copyrights to each source code file, etc.
Re:Llamafile lets you distribute and run LLMs with a single file
on Thursday November 30, 2023 @07:18AM (#38472590)
The CPU usage is around 30% when idle (not handling any HTTP requests) under Windows, so you won't want to keep this app running in background. Otherwise, it's a nice try.
Re:My personal C coding style as of late 2023
on Monday October 09, 2023 @04:54AM (#37818400)
This is length of a null-terminated string, e.g. lengthof("abc").
Re:My solopreneur story: zero to $45K/mo in 2 years
on Monday September 25, 2023 @08:20AM (#37642560)
Thank you. Unfortunately, my experience is the same: it's hard to promote a software project on today's Internet without investing a lot of money or spending 4 hours/day on social media like the original poster did. There are many interesting projects like yours that remain invisible to their potential users.
Re:I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser
on Friday September 22, 2023 @03:48PM (#37616840)
You can afford not reading news only if you live in a democratic country with a stable economy, far from any conflict zones. In other parts of the world, you would miss information that you need for your survival.
Re:Calculate the difference and intersection of any two regexes
on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @04:38AM (#37478267)
The double quote (") is also broken. If you use it in the regex, then no DFA is displayed.
Re:Calculate the difference and intersection of any two regexes
on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @04:32AM (#37478233)
The web page hangs on the regular expressions that produce a DFA with a lot of states. For example, these ones:
(ab+c+)+
(abc){100}
a.*quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Re:Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?
on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @06:27AM (#37319830)
And now I have 2 minuses on this Hacker News comment from the angry Pythonistas :D That's how they attack you.
These people learned only Python, don't know any other programming language, and now evangelize it to everyone, making excuses for its obvious faults and problems. That's the essence of this community.
Re:Ask HN: Why Did Python Win?
on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @06:21AM (#37319775)
Not ignoring, but taking it seriously without demagogy and trying to prove that 2+2 equals to five.