Announcing the POL version of SciTE!

[Yukiko]

There has been, for ages, a need for a decent IDE for eScript. There are a few programmes that provide a decent editing environment. Some even allow code highlighting. Almost since I started programming eScript I have been using SciTE. It wasn't bad as editors go but it lacked a few of the features you might want to have in an IDE. Recently ThisIsMe began looking into SciTE's "hidden" capabilities. I use quotation marks around the word because, unless you delve deep into SciTE's documentation, its capabilities are rather hard to find. But he found them!

Today I am proud to bring you POL SciTE!
I have created a PDF document that shows you the great new features ThisIsMe has added to SciTE. The document contains an overview of POL SciTE's features, a link to download it, instructions for setting it up, and some helpful tips and customization information. Set-up is easy once you download it. So get the PDF and give it a try.

Be sure to thank ThisIsMe if you find POL SciTE useful.

The new Dark Theme:


Two different colours for comments


Highlighted functions etc:


Highlighted re-occurence of the same word:


Tabbed open files:


Call tips:


Autocomplete suggestions:

[boberski]

Great work Kiko!

[AasanDar]

Got it! Will give it a whirl. Nicely done folks.

Thank you ThisIsMe!

[Yukiko]

@Boberski, I did not do the work on POL SciTE!
ThisIsMe did ALL the work.
Now if you are talking about the exquisite design work put into the PDF document then I accept the praise
but POL SciTE is all a result of ThisIsMe digging into SciTE's documentation.

[Yukiko]

I have updated the PDF to include a note that the screen shots for adding custom call tips were made with line wrap on, Options --> Wrap. Each call tip must be on one line including the additional help text.

There is also an addition setting that you can add for autocomplete. Just search the document for autocomplete and you will find it.

Again thanks to ThisIsMe for finding the new autocomplete setting.

[ThisIsMe]

I hope you guys enjoy it, I was making tweaks up until the eleventh hour yesterday which included the auto complete function name lists automatically coming up which I only figured out how to get working yesterday at work reading a Korean based email exchange trying to get the Hangul characters to work properly in SciTE.

I have a few updates I want to make and will post here including auto indentation on the if, function, repeat, do, while, elseif, else, for, case, enum' keywords. The idea it to just have it auto indent in from where the keyword is located on the following line. Coloring the auto complete list box a dark themed color scheme if possible. The lexer itself needs at least an additional change as I forgot to add enum to the code wrap stuff (the plus/minus symbols on the left hand side of the screen).

Of all the changes I've made however, the best and most useful thing for me is the hotkey/context menu Dec to hex and hex to Dec. Now there's no excuses to find decimal obj type numbers in itemdesc, includes and src files .

I'm also up for suggestions and other tweaks any of you have ideas for.

[Yukiko]

Yes, the conversion of decimal to hexadecimal and vice-versa is great. I also like the call tips. As we haven't had that before I suspect I will find it as or more useful than the converter.

One of the things that prevents POL SciTE from working more like a "proper" IDE is eScript's loose typing of variables. You and I have discussed the possibility of coming up with standard variable names for the various classes in POL, at least for our own purposes, such as the character class. We talked about using "who", "character", "player" etc. as names and then we could associate methods and members that apply to the class "character" to those variable names. If we do this then we, probably you , could implement autocomplete for methods and members. It would require some thought to come-up with enough unique variable names for some of the classes but that is one way to work around the weak typing issue. Basically we would be artificially enforcing typed variable names. I think this is a better compromise than just listing all members and methods when someone enters a period after an identifier whether those members and methods apply to the use of that identifier or not.

I have gone through the trouble of getting screen shots sized properly for the forums and will be updating the original post with them. Users will still need to download the PDF for instructions but at least they can see your handywork here. Maybe that will pique their interest.

[Yukiko]

Has anyone used this? I would like to know if there are any bugs that we might have missed. The problem with testing something you have written or modified is that you are too familiar with the way it is "supposed" to work that you miss things.

[Daviex]

Hey, really good job ThisIsMe! Is always accepted an Editor that has some highlighting and intellisense!

Thanks again for the tool, and thanks Yukiko for the PDF

[DevGIB]

I have used it a little bit just to test some functionality.
So far it all seems to work fairly well, however i'll still likely stick with my Ultra Edit (and admittedly will release my word file shortly once i figure out how to complete some other things i want in it).

The reason i don't like SciTE was there doesn't appear to be an easy way to implement a tree view which is what i mostly use for jumping around files.

Otherwise the document and the setup seem to function fine.

The only tweak i would ask is if you could supply just the POL specific files, that way i can download an install SciTE standalone and then dump your files on top.

[Yukiko]

As I think I mentioned earlier the problem with using a version of SciTE other than the one we currently provide is that the official SciTE does not yet have the updated eScript lexer which provides 5 additional highlight colours. If you can live with only 3 colours then you can just copy a few files and have the features from this version. However we felt having the option of creating highlights for custom functions or splitting the colours used for current eScript keywords into more colours was too good of a feature to pass up.

We are seeking to have ThisIsMe's modifications to the lexer added to the official version of SciTE.

Perhaps in a future post ThisIsMe can list the relevant files and those who wish to use the more restrictive official version of SciTE can use it.

Hopefully the maintainer of SciTE will accept ThisIsMe's mods.

I forgot to make it clear that the lexer is compiled into SciTE and is not a separate dll or file. If it does get accepted we will announce it here.

[Yukiko]

I agree that having a tree view is one feature that would make SciTE a nice choice for a free editor.

SciTE is an open source project. If someone with more knowledge of C++ could add a tree view that would be wonderful.

I am glad there are people who can afford to pay for Ultra Edit and for an editor with its price tag it is a good editor.

[DevGIB]

I did manage to find a russian website which had scripts you could use to add a treeview, but i'm always cautious about installing random scripts from random russian websites

[Yukiko]

Ah go for it Dev. I found a SciTE project manager thing that looked promising but the last commit was at least 4 years ago I think. I prefer using things that are somewhat actively developed. Were those scripts for adding tree view to SciTE? If so PM the link to me and maybe I can review them. I'm not an expert in Lua but it isn't too much different than eScript or Pascal. So I should be able to understand most of what is going on.