[OT] Rev + BBEdit

[Richard Gaskin]

Ben Rubinstein wrote:

> Richard Gaskin wrote:
>> My long term goal is to separate debugging from editing
> 
> Robert Brenstein wrote:
>> You may want to fetch TextWrangler, a free sibbling of BBEdit, from
>> BareBones website. Most of those things are there, so you can just try
>> them out.
> 
> Which somewhat makes Robert's point... Far be it from me to discourage anyone
> from doing a lot of work to make a better script editor in Rev, that I can
> then take a free (or indeed reasonably priced!) ride on.  But I wonder whether
> the effort might instead better go into finding a better solution to
> integration with existing external editors.  That way, maybe we could all take
> a free (or reasonably priced) ride on the work done in BBEdit, TextMate,
> Eclipse and the like.

An attractive idea, but still brings us back to the central problem of 
script editing in Rev:  to the best of my knowledge every script editor 
available, even MC's, is bound up in a debugger.  Lose the editor, and 
you lose debugging.

And while editing can be done anywhere (MC's had the ability to use an 
external editor built in since v1.6 when I started using it, although 
IIRC it's only for Linux), debugging can only be done inside Rev.

Sooner or later, someone needs to bite the bullet and build a debugger 
that's independent from the editor.

Ken maintains MC's Variable Watcher, which is as close to being 
independent of any specific IDE as I've seen yet.  MC also has a 
built-in profiler, which although still bound to other parts it could be 
extracted and would make a nice addition to scripting in any Rev-based 
IDE.  I have some complexity analysis tools I could toss into the mix as 
well.

But nice-to-haves aside, the core work of making a separate debugger is 
a big tak, and since I spend more time editing than debugging I'm 
putting my time into the former right now.  And with the amount of 
JavaScript/HTML stuff I'm doing these days, I'll have my hands full 
making a dual-use editing environment (not to mention using it <g>).

Anyone feel like taking up the challenge of making a dedicated debugger?

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com