Script Editor future (was Open Source Kickstarter Report Card)

[Kay C Lan]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 10:46 PM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com
> wrote:

> Kay C Lan wrote:
>
> a better mechanism to track the changes and transfer those back and
>> forth - that improvement can only be done from the mothership.
>>
>
> What's needed?
>
> Let's make it so.
>

Love the positive attitude :-)

>From memory stsMLXEditor was written when the SE was a seperate animal to
the Debugger, hence:

The external editor will not open a script if the IDE script editor window
> is open.
>

I think when the SE and Debugger merged stsMLXEditor became less useful
because it was no longer possible to have just the Debugger open and my TE.
I haven't had a look for quite a while, so maybe I need to give it another
whirl and see - although it looks as though a few others are giving it a go
so maybe they'll come up with some constructive criticisms.

And in the interest of Full Disclosure, when I said 'Well yes and no' to my
TE letting me add breakpoints, the Yes was because 99.9% of the time I use
"breakpoint" hard coded in my scripts. I've played with Red Dots but I've
had them ignored on too many occasions so I've given up on them and just
use "breakpoint". I appreciate that others use the Red Dots all the time
and have far more success with them. I appreciate that they are far more
powerful that a hard coded "breakpoint" because they can be conditional. So
there would need to be a way to implement Red Dots for those who like them.

IMO, basic Red Dots are the same as a hard breakpoint. In my TE I type
cmd-B and I get "breakpoint" typed out for me - it's faster than grabbing
the mouse and clicking on the screen. As a suggestion, conditional
waypoints would require something like typing out: breakpointCondtional if
tVar = "garbage" then breakpoint. In this case it would require the LC Team
to parse breakpointConditional into a Conditional Red Dot. And vice versa.

I think at the moment Red Dots are probably the biggest issue because if
you modify blocks of script that contain Red Dots, with blocks of text with
a different line count, then the Red Dots are deactivated and typically
will no longer match the line they were originally attached to.

As you've noted, colourisation is a personal thing. Some find it
distracting, others helpful. My TE currently doesn't have the same
colourisation capabilities as the SE does so it would be nice if brought
into line. I understand Peter added LC colourisation to the Atom Editor.
Again I need to have a look at that some time. Interestingly, whilst I
normally do like colourisation, when ever I do get a very long script line
that fails due to some misplaced ", a quick copy and paste in to my TE
quickly reveals the culprit because the more basic colourisation of my TE
allows the error to be pinpointed more quickly. If my TE matched the SE
colourisation, then this wouldn't work.