There’s a relatively new entry in genuine Windows freeware for complex text-manipulation, and this hadn’t been found when I made my summer 2019 survey of Freeware for cleaning and manipulation of text lists.

It’s TextWorx by bgmCoder, a “Universal Text Manipulator”. It lives up to the name, in terms of being able to use it with any text-editor. Highlight the text block you want to work with. Press a keyboard shortcut. Up pops a well-organised tool offering a huge range of “advanced text-manipulation routines”.

The default keyboard shortcut required to trigger the menu is a bit of a contortionist show-stopper, or else it requires you to remove your hand from the mouse:

Win key + K or Win key + shift + K.

But the shortcut is not hardwired and can be changed in the .INI file. And it’s easy enough to trigger a keyboard shortcut with a mouse-gesture. Choose a gesture that ends up somewhere suitable on the screen, since your mouse-cursor position is where the TextWorx interface will appear.

What it doesn’t seem to have is regex functions. It can’t thus function as a handy regex ‘key-ring’. For instance it can’t do things like “Extract all text found between KEYWORD1 and KEYWORD2 to a new List”. For that you’d want regex or Sobolsoft’s £20 “Extract Data Between Two Strings” utility software, which saves the extracted substrings as a list. Or you could save £20 by doing the same with this tested-and-working regex and a copy of the free Notepad++…

FIND:         .*?KEYWORD1(.*?)KEYWORD2|.+
REPLACE:    \1\r\n