use Perl

caring about details - part eight

This part is especially for users of Kommodo, padre, np++, SciTe and so on. because they benefited from Kephra too. They all use the scintilla lexer written by the malaysian kein hong man++. Perl people should at least heard this name once. I filed several bugreports, he later worked on so that that the perl lexer works also in some more weird cornercases like e.g. hash keys that begin with "-". the last thing i filed was last week. it was about hierar

caring about details - part seven.

in previous parts, I often wrote about features, that are so small, that they appear only in the changefile of smaller releases. This time, its about things you hardly ever read in about in release notes. Nonetheless they play a big part in the experience, using that program. I have to apologize, because user experience is another overused marketing term, but it decribes what I mean very well so don't mind the hype.

last time I used this topic, it was just about the line editing commands. of cource there is more. and the major idea is to pay attention to what you need right now, while you trying to achieve something another way that you do in your imagination. Its the Perl principles, brought into the realm of coding.

In the last post I mentioned Kephra's menu definition files. These can only work, because we have a very important file namend commandlist. There is a binding of a chunk of data to each call. the internal call, a callback that says me which state this call has or if should be disabled. also events the will be triggered if that data or status changes, an association to an icon file and the key binding is also defined there. the label and hint texts are of course part of the localisation.

yes its the next logical step. the technical basis for that is there and it doesn't sound that challenging to me. Now menu items deactivate (turn into a shadow) if the enable call say no (aka 0 aka '' :) ) and this calls are checked before the menu popup. because on windows this event is fired on any menu popup of the main menu, i currently thinking about to change the enabling and toggle items if the content changing event was triggered. its not a too large change because currently the Kephra::Menu lib can do a lot of dynamic and flexible stuff. just hiding items is a nice idea i just have to test it on a small prototype but it doesnt make that much sense now, because there arent that much things that get disabled.

the other thing you wrote about are menus for special syntax modes. padre already does it and kephra will also have it after 0.5. we currently build some features that are pretty basic and urgently needed in Kephra. but after that i have planned to introduce syntax modes, that go beyong highlighting. its about what comment chars belong to that language and what tools and so on and then you will get such dynamic menu. its all already working in my head. you just have to download it and run the brain2perl.pl. :)

part four.

Kephra has a main menu, that is compiled from a yaml file you can open via the "config > interface" menu. So you can change it easily with the previously listed line edit commands. It serves as an overview, sorted by topic. Optimized for finding a function you looking for, not optimized for finding it after the first click, that's the task for context menus. This main menu I refactor from time to time, to keep it structure sense-making, balanced and beautiful.

(or caring about details part three)

Kephra 0.4.3 will come soon and the beside the finally arriving utf support it will also have markers. its the same thing notepad++, kommodo and scite call bookmarks. Not that I want to be different, but its not the same thing as the bookmarks Kephra has for nearly 2 years and I also believe that these terms are more correct.

My brother asked me recently this question, because after his quick view over the net pages it seemed to lack great, shiny and distinctive features. He never used Perl but this question is also relevant to many programmer here, because Padre promises some big features Kephra don't seems to have on it's list and Eclipse and Netbeans (what he uses beside Notepad++) seem to play in another class.

In recent Kephra refactorings, I changed a behaviour of the autoconverter. It works now a bit differently then in common editors, but it is not a big thing. The mindset behind it I find important. It's also very satisfying to see it working in Kephra 0.4.2.9 the way i feel is right.

while releasing Kephra 0.4.2 on sourceforge, I noticed that the changed their system completely. Its now much simpler to use, but 3 tricks there are still. Better you know them in forehand.

Step 1: mark the folder you want to put your uploaded files into, by right click, open the context menu and select the second item: "upload here". if you don't do that the file will appear at the bottom of the filetree.

The release of Kephra 0.4.2 thought me lot of things. Yes it was inevitable that after a long complicated internal rewrite, a lot of nifty bugs poped up all over the place. It took nearly 3 days to get a devent version for a rerelease.

It demonstrated also that my roadmap was to static and that the steps are to big. 0.4.3 will come much sooner and concentrate on only one issue: codings.

Yes thats an important one and the first bigger release of the Editor that keeps beauty and integrity in mind for several month.

I searched again and found nothing substantial in both mailinglist which should discuss this topic. So mayby its lack of manpower, maybe lack of demand or of demand * manpower.

your request for a qt binding seems natural to me, but but ithink there were license problems, since the qt license is much more strict. it would appear to me much much more balanced to appreciate what robin&vadim&co achieved. after all ot is a small team that maybe have not enough free manhours to write such binding.

As the Wx roadmap points out, all major goals for the next big release are met. They write: "We hope to make 3.0 in the first half of 2010.". Yes, Wx development is slow (meaning conservative) but why wait for so long?