keyword highlighting

[nolan.rumble]

Hi,

I would like to first say that it's awesome to see my feature request (keyword highlighting) appearing the latest release of SecureCRT!!

Having said that I have some questions as the documentation of the feature is somewhat limited.

1. Can I use a combination of literal strings and regex strings?
2. If I want case sensitivities to be applied to a particular string but not others, would I have to use a regex string for that?
3. What's the reason for not allowing spaces in the regular experessions? The program says that it can't use regex strings with spaces, but in other programs I can use the literal space character as well as \s to indicate a space without a problem?
4. If I wanted to match a string and then highlight the whole line or a series of characters/words following the line, how would/can I do this?
5. Once I've created a list with one entry and applied it to a session which is still connected, it will highlight the first keyword in the list but no others. It seems that I have to completely shutdown SecureCRT before the list reads all the other key word highlighting rules. Disconnecting from the session is not sufficient. Am I doing something wrong?
6. Can you provide a more extensive list of sample regex strings that are compatible with SecureCRT?
7. What's the maximum number of (regex/literal) strings I can add before SecureCRT starts to have a noticeable slowdown in performance?

Once again...thanks for the feature! I will definitely be using it quite extensively.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Nolan

[nolan.rumble]

Sorry....I meant to say that I don't have to close SecureCRT. The keyword highlighting change only takes effect if I close the session/tab. If I disconnect and reconnect, it still doesn't apply the list. Not sure if that's by design?

Thanks
Nolan

[Casey]

Although I bet I could answer your questions, I'll let the powers that be answer them in their official speak.

I will share my experience on your last question though:

Originally Posted by nolan.rumble

7. What's the maximum number of (regex/literal) strings I can add before SecureCRT starts to have a noticeable slowdown in performance?

In my experience thus far, the number of keywords has largely been irrelevant. I personally tested a keyword file with several hundred entries and SecureCRT never skipped a beat. The limitation *appears* to be the complexity of those RegEx expressions.

The one and only time that I've been able to bog down SecureCRT's keyword matching (all the way to the application reporting as 'not responding') was when I had multiple active tabs connected; one was doing an ftp transfer of a large file and one of those tabs was capturing (logging) a 'show tech' from our Nexus 5k switch. The log was matching a lot of complicated RegEx keywords, scrolling really fast, and totaled over 40meg when finished. It was pretty hilarious.

I'm not completely sure why it bogged down. None of my machine's 8 cores showed 100% and I had plenty of memory free.

TLDR Version: Unless you're nuts, it should preform fine with whatever you throw at it.

[bgagnon]

Hello Nolan,

That's a lot of questions. I may not have answers to them all, but I will try my best. I also have a few clarifying questions.

(Thanks for your input Casey!)

1. Can I use a combination of literal strings and regex strings?

Do you mean for the list itself? In other words, first entry is a literal, second entry is a regex, etc.? If so, the answer is yes.

Actually, I guess the answer is yes in either case. If you mean, for example, the entry is part literal and part regex (ie: 2014\-\d+\-\d+ would highlight dates in form of yyyy-mm-dd).

2. If I want case sensitivities to be applied to a particular string but not others, would I have to use a regex string for that?

I am not sure I understand the context for the above inquiry. Can you provide a "real-world example"?

What I *think* you are asking is a way to apply "Match case" per line, is that accurate?

3. What's the reason for not allowing spaces in the regular experessions? The program says that it can't use regex strings with spaces, but in other programs I can use the literal space character as well as \s to indicate a space without a problem?

That is another feature request (to support phrases). Presently a space is a delimiter for regular expressions.

I have added this thread to a feature request in our product enhancement database to support substring and phrase matches in keyword highlighting (regex). Should a future release of SecureCRT include this feature, notification will be posted here.

If you prefer direct email notification, contact support@vandyke.com and include "Feature Request - Forum Thread #11750" in the subject line.

4. If I wanted to match a string and then highlight the whole line or a series of characters/words following the line, how would/can I do this?

If spaces are involved, see above. Otherwise, you would use .*.

5. Once I've created a list with one entry and applied it to a session which is still connected, it will highlight the first keyword in the list but no others. It seems that I have to completely shutdown SecureCRT before the list reads all the other key word highlighting rules. Disconnecting from the session is not sufficient. Am I doing something wrong?

Sorry....I meant to say that I don't have to close SecureCRT. The keyword highlighting change only takes effect if I close the session/tab. If I disconnect and reconnect, it still doesn't apply the list. Not sure if that's by design?

It seems your later post was an update to #5, but I still don't understand the current behavior.

Could you post screenshots showing both the list configuration and highlighted results?

If it contains sensitive data, please attach to an email and send to support@vandyke.com and reference "Attn Brenda - Forum Thread #11750".

6. Can you provide a more extensive list of sample regex strings that are compatible with SecureCRT?

Since regex strings are subjective based on the output you are trying to parse, I think it would be a little difficult to provide more "real-world" examples, but I have made a feature request for additional documentation.

The "standard" we used for our regex support is ECMAScript.

7. What's the maximum number of (regex/literal) strings I can add before SecureCRT starts to have a noticeable slowdown in performance?

For #7, I don't know of any documented, finite limit. Casey is a definitely a power user of SecureCRT, so I will defer to his experience.

[bgagnon]

Hi all,

Just to update the thread with the latest, with respect to #3 from Nolan's initial post, SecureCRT's product director has provided this additional information about why only "keyword" highlighting is supported at this time, not "phrases or substrings" (words with spaces).

A while back, we investigated adding support for highlighting phrases and the performance hit was significant. We don't have a timeline for implementing this feature because we will need to do some more investigation to determine if this can be implemented in a way that is practical.

Posted February 17, 2016.

SecureCRT v7.3.6 is the official release.

SecureCRT v8.0 is in beta release.

This URL allows users to check their SecureCRT upgrade eligibility.

[Maureen]

The ability to match phrases and substrings when doing keyword highlighting has been added to SecureCRT 8.7, which is currently in beta testing. It can be downloaded here.

Maureen