Want to help test RegexPilot?
It's a visual regex builder for macOS — drag blocks to build patterns, see a plain-English breakdown, test against 21 real language engines (JS, Python, Java, Go, Rust, PHP…), and let AI draft patterns from a description. No more guessing whether your regex actually works in production.
I'm looking for a few beta testers on macOS 14+.
Hi r/macapps,
I’m a solo developer and I’ve spent far too many hours trying to debug regular expressions. Most of the time the problem wasn’t writing the regex, it was figuring out whether it actually did what I thought it did.
So I built RegexPilot, a macOS app designed to make regular expressions easier to understand, test, and maintain.
Some highlights:
One thing that makes it a bit different from most regex tools is that it runs patterns against the actual language runtimes instead of approximating everything through a JavaScript engine:
and more.
So if you’re debugging a Python regex, you’re testing against Python itself.
Privacy was important to me:
Pricing:
Website: https://regexpilot.com
I’d love feedback from fellow Mac users, especially around the UI, workflow, and whether the visual approach actually makes regexes easier to work with.
Hi r/regex,
First of all if this is not the place for me to post this feel free say so and I'll remove the post, I just wanted to share with you and receive some feedback on what features people here would love in a tool like this, or even negative criticism. I've built it in the first place for myself but it might be useful for others especially those learning regular expressions or people who are more visual thinkers like myself.
I built RegexPilot, a macOS regex tool to solve a problem that kept biting me: many regex testers advertise support for multiple flavors, but internally route everything through a JavaScript engine and emulate the rest. That means patterns can appear to work in the tester and then fail in production. Or AI generating a regex that later turns out to be not entirely what I was looking for.
RegexPilot runs each flavor against its actual interpreter/runtime:
Typical execution time is around 1–3 ms.
Other features:
Privacy notes:
Website: https://regexpilot.com
A couple of questions for the regex crowd:
I’d love feedback from people who regularly work across multiple regex flavors.
The roadmap is also on the website if you'd like to see what I have planned next. There's even a demo on the site so you don't even have to download the app or have OS X to try some of the basic things
Hi all, I’m a solo developer, and like probably most of you, I have a love-hate relationship with regex. Whenever I have to build something complex, I spend half my time wrestling with the syntax and the other half debugging why it’s not matching what I think it should.
So I built a regex tool with Tauri that solves a problem I kept hitting: most regex testers route every flavor through one JavaScript engine and approximate the rest. So your "Python regex" tab is actually a JS engine pretending — and patterns that work in the tester silently break in production.
RegexPilot bundles the actual interpreters as sidecars:
Each flavor runs against its real engine in 1–3ms.
Other things worth knowing:
Free to download — fully functional for 30 days, then reverts to JavaScript/TypeScript-only (the most common case). Existing library entries for non-JS flavors stay visible but become read-only after trial. Nothing breaks. Fully functional besides the sidecar engines and AI. So if JavaScript is all you work with it's basically free.
The goal is to make regex easier to understand by showing exactly how patterns behave against real input, instead of relying on trial-and-error across multiple tools.
Core features:
We’re still early, so feedback from real developers will directly shape the product.
Who it’s for:
Beta access is free during the testing period. Testers providing valuable feedback and/or reporting bugs will receive a free version of v1. Feedback via https://github.com/Kristofp/regex-pilot-issues
RegexPilot is an interactive workspace for building and debugging regular expressions. The goal is to make regex easier to understand by showing exactly how patterns behave against real input, instead of relying on trial-and-error across multiple tools.
Core features:
We’re still early, so feedback from real developers will directly shape the product.
Who it’s for:
Beta access is free during the testing period. Testers providing valuable feedback and/or reporting bugs will receive a free version of v1. Feedback via https://github.com/Kristofp/regex-pilot-issues
RegexPilot is an interactive workspace for building regular expressions. The goal is to make regex easier to understand by showing exactly how patterns behave against real input, instead of relying on trial-and-error across multiple tools.
Core features:
We’re still early, so feedback from real developers will directly shape the product.
Who it’s for:
There's also a demo on the website with limited functionality.
Beta access is free during the testing period. And people that provide valuable input and spot real bugs will get v1 for free.
