boxes/_posts/2021-02-15-boxes-v2.0.0-released.md

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

A major update which brings Unicode support for input text and PCRE2 regular expressions:

• 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. 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 and still get correct boxes around it. Thanks to residualmind!

• The regular expression engine was upgraded to state-of-the-art PCRE2. 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

• Mike 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)]