Doesn't the regex syntax differ between them?
Hum, good point, it might. Although, it probably is "mostly" the same if using the same extension mode. IIRC GRegex is using gnu regex, but maybe modified.
The diff against ctags looked really scary but maybe if I just took the uctags version and GRegex-ified it, it might not be so bad.
That'd be a good surprise ^^
I just wasn't particularly motivated by the languages we use - ActionScript (which is used by Flash and is about to die) and Cobol which might be used by some legacy mainframe software but that's about it.
I'd be more interested in Cobol than ActionScript, but yeah both are probably niches in 2018.
I also don't think it's worth writing proper parsers for these.
Meh, were would the fun be then? :(
It might be different if we want to use more regex-based parsers from uctags but my current thinking is something like: "If a language is popular enough, it probably has a proper parser in uctags and then we should support it in Geany. If the language is not popular enough to have an uctags parser, there's no need to support it in Geany".
Makes some sense. And actually, the largest use case for the regex engine in ctags is custom language definitions on the CLI/options file, and we don't support that, so it's no so useful.