Another Tick for the WishList

[Gregery D Engle]

Customized syntax coloring - The ability to add/delete change
colors of any word we wish. I often find myself wanting
a certain keyword a different color and/or a Winapi keyword
highlighted as well. A simple .conf file would be sufficiant
with all keywords and colors settings

Another way to work with the Customized Syntax Coloring is to use a
metastatement, eg:

#compile exe
#color SendMessage, BLUE, UCASE
#color Yoga, Purple, UCASE

function pbmain()
..
..
end function

That would be nice too because people exchanging source file's
will keep syntax highlighting in tact.

- a Tooltip popup display the proper syntax for the current keyword.
I forget the syntax too much.



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-Greg

[Gary Akins]

I'll second the motion for customizing the syntax coloring; I was just going to ask if there was a way to do that...

I'm not necessarily interested in being able to customize individual keywords, but it would be nice to be able to change the colors the IDE uses for highlighting - that light-green color the editor currently uses for comments is kinda hard for me to read against a white background.

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[Trevor Lane]

I do not have a problem with the default colours but a lot of
people do. The ability to change the default colours in an IDE
is not really just a nice to have but an essential. Many people
are colour blind to some degree and light green on white may as
well be white on white. The ability to change colours will make
the program more accesible to a lot of people.

IMHO
Trevor

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[Lance Edmonds]

Thanks guys! This one _is_ definitely on the wish list already, so I'll ask for a few more tick marks to be added against it.


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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Gary Akins]

Color vision is, indeed, a quirky thing... (especially for us guys, since the genes that determine color vision seem to reside primarily on the X chromosome, and thus we XY-types only get one shot at getting a "good" copy while the ladies get two... can we sue Nature for gender discrimination? ) As an example: the green color which the PB/DLL IDE uses for comments tends to get lost against the white, for me, yet the teal color which Aditor (another programmers' editor) uses as it's default color for comments is quite visible to me, even though you would think teal-on-white would be just as contrastless as green-on-white... go figure.

Trevor's comment about color blindness is a good one, and it makes me wonder if the IDE couldn't be further extended to render the different highlights in different fonts, as well? (It doesn't have to save them that way, of course, just display them.) I.E. put comments in italics, keywords in bold, so you'd wind up with something like this:

[i]'--create a dialog box for our main program window[/i]
[i]'--abort program if window could not be created (hDlg = 0)[/i]
DlgFmt& = %DS_CENTER [b]OR[/b] %WS_CAPTION [b]OR[/b] %WS_SYSMENU
[b]DIALOG NEW[/b] 0, $AppTitle, , , 300, 150, DlgFmt& , 0 [b]TO[/b] hDlg

[b]IF[/b] hDlg = 0 [b]THEN EXIT FUNCTION[/b]

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[This message has been edited by Gary Akins (edited January 03, 2001).]

[Barry Erick]

Add me to the list wanting to BOLD out the words and
not just color them.
--Barry

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[Gregery D Engle]

The thing I love about the current IDE is that is small and fast.
I click it and I don't have to wait for anything to load, it just
works very well. So I don't want that to be sacraficed with the
new IDE

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-Greg

[Neil Hosgood]

My Two Cents...
Colour (color for ya foriengers) blindness is colour blindness,
it doesn't matter what colour you make the text, unless....
it's red and green, then everyone will have trouble seeing the
colours... Anyway, it's the compiler we all love?? so if you
really want an editor that can run your compiler and you can
control then try SYNEDIT. It's free and who knows, you might even
be able to give it an o****m !

[Ian Cairns]

Neil,
You seem to have the mistaken impression that the Americans speak English. They neither speak it, nor do they spell it. They even think that the last letter of the alphabet is pronounced "Zee" instead of "Zed".
Regards,

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[email protected]

[This message has been edited by Ian Cairns (edited January 05, 2001).]

[Eric Pearson]

At least we can pronounce the letter H.

-- Eric

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Perfect Sync: Perfect Sync Development Tools
Email: mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Trevor Lane]

Neil,

forgive me for being so rude but you really know nothing at all
about colour blindness do you. Just like deafness, some people
have difficulty with just one colour, others the lot. Some deaf
people (like myself) are deaf to just one tone, others to many.

Why not read a book on interface design. You will learn that the
ability to change colours in operating environments is to help
accesibility, and as an additional benefit allows people to pretty
up their desktop, IDE or whatever. It is not the other way around.

I don't want to go on about it, but due to my own deafness I am
not too tolerant of the blinkered vision and lack of sympathy
displayed by some 'normal' (what's normal) people.

Regards
Trevor.

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[Steven Pringels 3]

Hi,

To all, yes I want to have the colors be able to change and
preferable BOLD as well. I'm colorblind for lots of colors but
mainly blue shades.

The first thing I do when I work on a computer that's not my own
is change all blue to black.

So, put a tick for me too !! And Trevor I understand exactly what you
mean.

Besides this one:
PLEASE POWERBASIC, GIVE US A DEBUGGER THAT WORKS
OUTSIDE PBEDIT !!! PBEDIT is great but can't be compared with
MultiEdit or even UltraEdit !!!




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[Sven Blumenstein]

Steven,
why don't you use a debugger like NuMega SoftICE or Borland Turbo Debugger?

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e-mail: [email protected]

[ian mcallister]

I must agree with Gregery's post above,
don't you all go and make the next editor a mass of confusing
bells and whistles will ya, while its obvious that improvements
can be made to the current (quite adiquate) editor after all
who hasen't come across the 256character limit while trying to
paste some code pilfered from this very forum,,, AAARRRGGGHHHH
Even so moderation is called for here, I use the editor on my
sub-notebook which only has a 9" x 6" screen so having five rows
of mandatory buttons would put the kybosh on that now

May I suggest a blend of subtle configurability with the really
useful bits to hand in menus/shortcut keys while whopping great
buttons/icons and obscure functionality like having this bit
turn blue when you press that bit might be optional.

I bet it'll be good tho'
oh and PS,,, can we have 256 layers of UNDO please

Ian

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[Gregery D Engle]

- AHHH I love the unlimited UNDO idea!!!

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-Greg

[Gregery D Engle]

at work I program in both PB/CC and PB/DLL as well as VB, with
all these extentions I get confused on what file should open
what file (hense the .BAS extention) what I suggest is having
PB/CC files with the extention .PCC and PB/DLL files with the
extention .PDL.

The problem with me simply just renaming the .BAS to the
above extentions is that if I open them up in PowerBasic,
the color syntax highlighting isn't turned on, I have to manually
turn it on for each file. So I think to solve this problem is
the ability to specify what extentions we want to have color
syntaxing.



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-Greg