Need for intellisense

[Steven Pringels 3]

Hi,

Well, with the use of objects comes the need for intellisense. Based on the analysis of the sourcecode one should be presented with a listbox with properties and methods and their arguments.

Any one care to consider this ? With Codemax this would almost have been a walk in the park. But since this is not actively developed/supported we need to resort to other means.

Maybe PowerBasic will come up with this in the future ?

Cheers
Steven

[Fred Harris]

As far as I'm concerned, that is the single biggest thing I missed in moving to PowerBASIC. Nothing else even comes close. Personally, it would be worth several hundreds of dollars to me to have an editor that provided that. Pretty much on a daily basis I think about it, and numerous times I've thought of exploring the possibilities of writing one myself; however, that sort of thing is not really within my particular area of expertise, and I know many members here would be much better able to code it than I.

All the other development environments I work with provide this capability. I started doing Windows programming with Visual Basic, and of course that is probably where the idea started. Later in the 90s I learned C++ and used it within that environment in Visual Studio also.

Within the Open Source scene I also took an early liking to Dev-C++ and Colin Laplace's Bloodshed Dev. environment, and that feature is present there. Within the past year I've started using the new CodeBlocks development environment for C++. That is also open source and is really cool because I can use it in Linux programming too and it looks and functions exactly the same. For my C++ embedded data collector programming work I use other Microsoft tools which sport 'intellisence'. I believe that feature also exists within the opensource SharpDevelop take off of Visual Studio. Everybody has it but us.

How about it editor writers? I want it bad, and you don't have to give it to me. I'd be more than willing to pay and pay big time.

[Fred Harris]

...and, while I've got my wallet open and I'm in a spending mood (doing my part to pull us out of this recession/depression), I want a project explorer like Lynx in the editor too.

[Petr Schreiber jr]

Hi,

I think José's SED 2.0 editor provides very good "code completion" feature.
Get editor here: http://www.jose.it-berater.org/smffo...sg9484#msg9484

You can force "code suggestions" using [CTRL]+[SPACE] when working with object variable.

SED also supports code folding and other features for programmers comfort.


Petr

[Marc Giao]

It's almost here:

http://www.phnxthunder.com/forums/ph...5a83b08a6725e7

If you know how, I don't, UltraEdit should also be able to do it?

[Paul Squires]

My FireFly Visual Designer 3 is improving on the intellisense features that were in version 2 and should be on par with Visual Basic by the time that it is released.

Another absolutely amazing display of intellisense is what Dominic is doing with his new version of the Phoenix Visual Designer. Surf on over to his supprt forum and check out some of the screenshots that he posted recently. It is incredible what he has done.

[Paul Squires]

Looks like Marc beat me to it....

[Fred Harris]

Thanks for the info Marc, Peter & Paul. It looks like Paul & Dominic are on top of it.

Maybe this might be a good time for me to mention something that I fear others may consider petty, but really looms large for me, and that is the issue of forcing a specific case such as uppercase on programmers using third party editors. This is something that PBEdit is really good about. The very first thing I do when I get a new vesion of PowerBASIC or an upgrade is go to the options menu and set the editor keyword case to 'Mixed Case'. Most folks I notice use upper case, and a few lower case. I like mixed case, kind of like Windows Api functions. I fear I'm being somewhat anal about it, but I've got a particular indentation style I like, a case style, and so forth. The editor I most frequently use is Jose's SED; however, I havn't updated to the newest version yet. With that editor though I always turn 'code completion' off, simply because it completes keywords in UPPER CASE, which violates my style, and I always end up going back and fixing the case, which is more work than simply turning it off. Different times I've made perfunctory serches of the SED source code looking for where the keywords are listed, but so far havn't found it. I just thought I'd mention this here because this post probably has the eye of 3rd party tool writers like Paul and Dominic, and this seemingly 'minor' issue really affects whether or not I'll use a product.

[Steven Pringels 3]

Wow !!! Amazing Stuff Dominic !!!

Paul, thank you for the info. Great that you consider a competitive product as well.

Soon I may say goodbye to MultiEdit for my PowerBasic development it seems.

Cheers

Steven

[Marc Giao]

Fred, mosey on over to Dominic’s and Paul’s site and let them know, they’re both very good listeners, I also happen to prefer mixed case.

[jcfuller]

I believe you can configure RadASM for that as well?
http://www.oby.ro/rad_asm/
James

[Christopher Carroll]

Phoenix - Mixed Case Keywords

In Phoenix, the default case for keywords is uppercase. To change this:
- in menu: Tools, Preferences
- select 'Editor' tab
- select 'Syntax Highlighting' category in list
- change other controls as needed.

i.e.:
- Language: 1. PB/DLL
- Color Group: 8. Constant
- Keywords Case: Mixed Case

[José Roca]

The very first thing I do when I get a new vesion of PowerBASIC or an upgrade is go to the options menu and set the editor keyword case to 'Mixed Case'. Most folks I notice use upper case, and a few lower case.

Apparently, the ones that like "Mixed Case" keywords are former VB programmers. C programmers generally use lower case and non-VB BASIC programmers generally use upper case. SED uses Scintilla for editing and this control doesn't have a VB-like mixed case option. The somewhat improperly named SC_CASE_MIXED option means that keywords will be displayed as you typed it. In the SED options I have used "Original case" to avoid confusion.

[Fred Harris]

Not sure how I came by my preferred case style. Perhaps VB had something to do with it; however, long before I used VB I used QuickBasic and that automatically converted everything to Upper Case, which I never liked, but couldn't do anything about it that I know of.

Anyway, is there any relatively easy way to cause the SED editor to use Mixed Case in the Code Completion feature? That is, instead of 'LONG', have it create 'Long'?

[Scott Slater]

I'm with you Fred on the mixed case. I also used QB (PDS 7) along with Borland C and eventually PB-DOS (which didn't change the case). In C I got used to most things being mostly in lower case. With the PowerBASIC Windows editors, I too always change the case to mixed right away as well as my tab depth and other things that I guess one could say I'm being "anal" about.

After all, in net speak isn't all upper-case considered YELLING?

[Cliff Nichols]

examples from the past in the source code forum show all 3 cases
examples all lower case (always drove me NUTS) but now make sense, they were probably written by someone with a C++ background

All Upper Case drive me NUTS cause it looks like the code is yelling at me

Mixed case makes the most sense to me (maybe my VB background) but to me, only keywords from the compiler should be upper case and and words from me (although important) should only capitalize or not depending on my style. (For me is long Variables that mean what they are called and if multiple words, then capitalize the beginning letter of that word to make the variable more human-readable

Intelli-sense only makes sense to me on a minor level (VB6 style) as .NET torqued me off with toooooooo many options for just a simple concept like "MyString." and it would drill down to 20 or more possible words each that could be misleading
"MyString.String2Long"
"MyString.Long2String.Text"
etc....etc....

All I can say is "KISS" ("Keep It Simple Stupid") or I will spend too much time listening to "KIZZ" ("Staying up ALLLLllll Night and NOT sleeping at all Day") trying to figure it out

[José Roca]

When we (at least some of us) were talking about upper case and mixed case, it was about keywords, e.g. Declare Function, instead of DECLARE FUNCTION, ByVal instead of BYVAL, etc., not in function, variables or parameter names.

[Cliff Nichols]

When we (at least some of us) were talking about upper case and mixed case, it was about keywords, e.g. Declare Function, instead of DECLARE FUNCTION, ByVal instead of BYVAL, etc., not in function, variables or parameter names.

Unless I am still misunderstanding, wouldn't you just change the options under "Window--->Options--->Editor Tab--->KeyWord Case"?????

[José Roca]

We weren't talking of the PB editor. Anyway, everyone has his own preferences. Mine are quite simple: keep the code as I type it.

[Erich Schulman]

Notepad++ is free and supports auto-completion. It doesn't have PB-specific support, but I already provided a start for it at http://www.powerbasic.com/support/pb...ad.php?t=39460