Text editor question

stephen barncard stephenREVOLUTION2 at barncard.com
Wed Dec 11 17:03:58 EST 2013


On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 8:40 AM, François Chaplais <
francois.chaplais at mines-paristech.fr> wrote:

> somebody has written a basic plain text editor in LC with multiple undo
> redo


​Only a couple of people, through many years of sweat, toil and heartache,
to create an alternative editor that was better than the one that comes in
the IDE.​

I think Richard Gaskin and Chipp Walters both had their own versions of
editors that worked in conjunction with the Metacard IDE, but they were for
their own use.

There were attempts to use a plugin to launch an external editor
application to edit scripts, but their use was so awkward as to hinder
workflow.

Almost all of the other editors have been created by Jerry Daniels and Marc
Wieder (on debuggers) .

The first was the experimental Constellation that I saw Jerry and a couple
of others using at Recon 2. Through begging and pleading, I got Jerry to
give me a copy.

Eventually it became GLX2, the greatest editor project known to x-talks. It
was wonderful, but evolved to be so complex with so many features it became
unstable, and Jerry had incredible ideas built into it like macros, etc.
but it still had to depend on the engine at the time, and cooperation of
the current IDE.

Jerry then started work on his revolutionary conceptual editor, which was
far simpler and feature limited, but didn't crash, as it was a compiled
application that ran outside of the running Revolution product and
communicated using simple 'agents' that worked asynchronously between the
IDE and the app ( eventually named RevZilla at the time) to gain access to
scripts in stacks. Later named "Remo" it promised the simplicity and
stability that the concept editor seem to have, and most of us that used
GLX2 switched to it for a couple of years until changes in the engine made
Remo inoperable and we had to move on.

I just sighed and learned to love the built-in editor; it still doesn't
facilitate a white character on black background in the editor without a
lot of patching and it still doesn't match the furniture. But I can have
multiple windows, the breadcrumbs are there. I'd love to disable the
feature that closes the window after the second compile by hitting return,
but those are my biggest complaints.

So it's part of the IDE and system, and it doesn't crash and works well. I
still hold the hope that the  Livecode editor can take a step forward in
the future that will put it on the par of the quality of the one that's in
the IDE of Xcode. Or some 18 year old and a storeroom of Jolt cola turns
out an amazing new IDE based editor with all the expected features that
works perfectly with the engine.

But I'd wait for the whole engine to be refactored first.

Recently… Jerry Daniels has offered a new FREE simple editor for those that
like the full screen - one page at a time view. It appears very stable and
might be great for simple stack projects. Quite beautiful, really  - a
great UI job by Daniels and Mara.

http://danielsmara.com/about-glass/


And GLX2 is now open source and more stable than it's ever been, thanks to
keeper of the flame Marc Wieder, who also designed the debugger. And
there's an undo feature, and I think he's got most of the bugs out.

https://bitbucket.org/mwieder/glx2/downloads

​hth.

sqb​


*--*
*Stephen Barncard - San Francisco Ca. USA - Deeds Not Words*



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