REXPaint

R9 is ready for download! While it doesn't contain any major new features, it was about time to cut down the to-do list, which was growing quite long from user suggestions and plenty of little things I discovered or thought of here and there (I used REXPaint pretty regularly).

So there have been a rather large number of little additions, adjustments, and bug fixes. See the changelog on the downloads page for the full list, or read on for some highlights.

You can now change the default image dimensions so that new images will default to something other than the canvas view size. So those users targeting certain systems/formats that require specific image dimensions will no longer be required to resize every image manually. This has been the most requested feature since R8 (other than support for an unlimited number of glyphs, that is, which may still happen but is pretty low priority).

Editing multiple images is now even easier: Use a hotkey (ctrl-tab) to swap back and forth between two images, increasing the window height (via config) will now extend the file browser to fill that height, and undo histories are remembered separately for each image, as are layer states (hidden/active).

The undo history now remembers every possible image editing action (it used to exclude layer manipulation and resizing). I'm not sure how heavily other users rely on layers, but I use them quite often for alternative elements and contextual notes in my GUI mockups, so while adding layer manipulation to the undo system was pretty annoying it'll definitely be worth it knowing the undo history won't be erased simply because I want to add a new layer. Now no matter what you do to an image, you can revert all the way to its initial blank state (and back again!).

Now that REXPaint features a perfect undo/redo system, auto-saving has also been implemented. This function was originally avoided since it might save changes that couldn't be undone. (If you still prefer not to auto-save, you can always disable it in the config file.)

Any devs working directly with .xp files should take note that with R9 there has been a tiny change to the .xp format. An .xp format version number is now inserted at the beginning of an image file to facilitate future updates if necessary. See Appendix B in the manual for details. This change in no way affects normal users, as REXPaint will still read old .xp files and retroactively update them automatically.