Script Editor future (was Open Source Kickstarter Report Card)

Kay C Lan lan.kc.macmail at gmail.com
Fri Aug 28 04:17:43 EDT 2015


On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 3:49 PM, RunRevPlanet <feed at smpcsupport.com> wrote:

>
> One of the promoted strengths of LiveCode is that it is "live coding". In
> other
> words I can make a change in my script and immediately see the effect.
>
> Now while I understand the virtues of using the external text editor of
> your
> choice. With your example of XCode and an external editor, is it possible
> to set
> breakpoints and single step through the code in your preferred external
> editor?
>

Well yes and no. As has already been pointed out, because of the long
standing undercurrent that people have longed for a SE with better text
manipulation capabilities, several attempts have been made by individuals
to achieve that. I've used Ken's stsMLXEditor a long time ago and it
allowed me to use my favourite text editor which allowed me to place
breakpoints anywhere I wanted. Like GLX2, which I like very much, they both
handed back debugging to Rev/LC. I have no problem with that - Text Editor
for text manipulation, debugger for debugging.

The problem though, was that stsMLXEditor was a bit of a patch job which
needed a better mechanism to track the changes and transfer those back and
forth - that improvement can only be done from the mothership. GLX2 used an
improved mechanism but only bought a handful of improved Text Editing tools
to the table - better than the inbuilt SE but no match for my favourite.
What both of these proved is that it is possible.

I don't use Atom but from some recent posting it appears that some kind of
LC/Atom connection has been made. I wonder if that may have been driven by
the amount of time the LC Team spend at Github and Atom is the Github team
developed Text Editor? Guess I better check it out.

And just to be clear, I've never suggested that LC should not have an SE,
it most definitely must, and as Richmond has suggested it's lack of bloat
is probably ideal for the new to programming or hobbyist level programmer.
My comments have only suggested the ability to use an external TE would be
a worthwhile enhancement as it would mean 'professional' programmers might
feel a little more comfortable and be a little more productive using tools
they are already familiar with.



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