---
layout: post
title: "New release: boxes v2.0.0"
date: 2021-02-15 22:00:00 +0100
release: v2.0.0
---

A major update which brings Unicode support for input text and PCRE2 regular expressions<!--break-->:

- We finally have Unicode support for input and output text as per [#1](https://github.com/{{ site.github }}/issues/1).
  In fact, most character sets on your system should now be supported. *Boxes* picks up your system encoding, but you
  can override that by using `-n`, e.g. `-n UTF-8`.
- We adopted [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org). This is a new major release.
- ANSI escape sequences are now supported in the input text. This means you can pipe your text through
  [lolcat](https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat) and still get correct boxes around it.
  Thanks to [residualmind](https://github.com/residualmind)!
- The regular expression engine was upgraded to state-of-the-art [PCRE2](http://www.pcre.org/current/doc/html/). 
  This means you have more powerful regular expression syntax at your disposal. It also means that any backreferences
  in your config file are now `$1` instead of `\1`.
- Due to the above changes, *{{ site.name }}* now has a runtime dependency on libunistring and pcre2. This is only
  relevant for package maintainers or people who build from source.
- Some deprecated box designs were dropped (*netdata*, *tjc*, *c-cmt3*, and *ccel*). If you miss them, you can get
  them back from an [old
  version](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{{ site.github }}/363e0266e083475b19f7539fd6beae699ade1890/boxes-config)
  of the config file.

- New box design '[jstone](https://github.com/{{ site.github }}/blob/{{ page.release }}/boxes-config#L2704-L2706)'
  by [Ed Schaller](https://github.com/schallee)
- [Mike Meyer](https://github.com/meyer)'s 'unicornthink' box design now allows smaller speech bubbles
- New box design '[bear](https://github.com/{{ site.github }}/blob/{{ page.release }}/boxes-config#L2611-L2640)'

The detailed changes can be seen in the [commit history](https://github.com/{{ site.github }}/commits/master).

[[Release History]({{ site.baseurl}}/releases.html)]