From: rcalco@...
Date: 2001-12-31T22:46:57+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29851] Re: FXRuby FreeRIDE Spike uploaded.

My $.02 on editors:

I dislike overambitious editors, especially in the color coding area. I like reserved words and operators being blue, comments being green, strings in purple, directives in dark gray, and everything in some monospace font, preferably lucida console. I don't like color coding everything from identifiers to module names to constants and so on... That loops more like Fruit Loops on my screen than code.

Scintilla's over-ambitious, gaudy color coding is something of a turn-off for me. (And by the way I know it can be easily customized to my liking, I would simply underutilize its color coding capabilities by about 80%).

Things I DO like in an editor besides modest color coding (and I know they are separate features really):

1. Extensible Code Templates. For instance, in MultiEdit, I can start to type a word like "class" and (because I told it to) it will prompt me for the name, any inheritance, and the initialize method's argument list, then layout the class the way I like it. Ditto for any other language construct. I can tell it that when I type "main" and hit my space bar it will generate the main loop skeleton for me, or if I type "head" it will put the header on top, complete with date, author, copyright, etc. When I get in a coding grove, code literally pops up out of nowhere on my screen, it's automatically formatted the way I like it, and I don't have to type that much to get that much.

2. Intellisense-type popups when I want to see a list of available properties and methods of a class or module. I don't like code completion per se though, where it takes its best guess at what I want to type and finishes the word for me, then won't let me fix it because it keeps trying to finish it for me. Just give me the list of methods and leave me alone!

I like being able to split the screen a couple times, including split screening in other files in the same view (multiedit gives me this). I also like the fact that in multi edit, I can write macros in its imitation-C language to infinitely extend the GUI and make the work with any language precisely the way I want it to. I guess I would have been an emacs guy if I were more heavily into Unix. Obviously, FreeRIDE should be extensible in Ruby, not lisp...

So anyway. Those are some of my preferences, many of which I got as a MultiEdit user. Just some feedback.

Sincerely,

Bob Calco