Top all-time · #18184
Aba Search and Replace blog
Company blog · abareplace.com/blog · on HN as abareplaceprogrammingweb
Aba Search and Replace blog is the company blog at abareplace.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2011, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
Aba is a tool for replacing text in multiple files. With Aba, you can quickly correct errors on your web pages, replace banners and copyright notices, change method names, and perform other text-processing tasks.
What Hacker News says?
It helps to start blogging about things that are related to your product or interesting to your target audience. I got the first users by writing about text-processing tasks that you can do with regular expressions: https://www.abareplace.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?”Submitted Windows Time Zone Changes for British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI wrote a tool for replacing text in multiple files with regular expressions under Windows. Currently, it's making less than $500/month, but there were months when it made more. It's one of the first regex tools that displays the search results immediately, without pressing a Search button. https://www.abareplace.com/
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on “Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2022 – Show and tell”Submitted The Age of Fast Food as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMy app is around 500 KB (not megabytes) and it supports dark mode (see https://www.abareplace.com/ ). So this is definitely possible without using Electron or bloated GUI libraries.
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on “Writing GUI apps for Windows is painful”Submitted Mnemonics for Hidden Controls in Win32 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.abareplace.com/ An old-school regex and text processing tool for web developers. Great for browsing source code, automating complex replacements, and decoding Base64, URL encoding, or Unix timestamps from your clipboard.
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)”Submitted How to replace HTML tags using regular expressions as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm working on a bulk search-and-replace tool for webmasters and developers that allows you to correct errors on your webpages, add width/height attributes to <img tags, convert all method names to lowercase/uppercase, insert a header with the filename and copyrights to each source code file, etc. https://www.abareplace.com/
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on “Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?”Submitted On coding with LLMs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI use ini files for my Windows application [1]. They are enough if you don't need multiple levels of nesting. The simpler the format is, the better. When storing settings in config files, you can just copy the program folder to another computer and your settings will be transferred. This is called "a portable application" in the Windows world. When using the registry, you need to export the registry keys and import…
Comment linking /docs/options.php
on “Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located”Submitted When msvc:musttail attribute silently fails as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm working on a regex / data conversion tool for web developers: https://www.abareplace.com Plan to add more handy features in the next version.
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)”Submitted Empty character class in JavaScript regular expressions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI continue to work on Aba Search and Replace, a tool for regex search and quick conversions (Base64, URL encoding, JSON Web tokens, timestamps to dates and vice versa). https://www.abareplace.com/
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (May 2026)”I continue to add more features to my search-and-replace tool for Windows ( https://www.abareplace.com/ ). I initially built in for myself and it was one of the first incremental grep implementations (allowing you to see the results as you are typing the search pattern). Now it supports various formats like Base64, URL encoding, or timestamp conversions. With one-liners, you can add width/height attributes to <img>…
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)”* enter the current and the new names, * turn on the Match whole word and Match case modes, * review the found occurrences; * press the Replace button. https://www.abareplace.com/blog/blog_rename_method/ Disclaimer: I wrote this program.
Comment linking /blog/blog_rename_method/
on “Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)”