I have a modest codebase (C++) that is well-documented but nonetheless very complex. I am involved in its maintenance and debugging, and I find myself drawing the same pictures over and over again, to check for wayward pointers and to look for optimizations. The pictures help a lot, as inconsistencies have crept into the code from time to time on seemingly logical optimizations.
It may be too much to ask, but is there an editor that would let me draw in the margins, a la MS Paint, as auxiliary comments, and maybe even to tack the picture to a particular line? Just in case such a thing exists, I would ideally like to use it alongside Vim.
Such an editor would have suffered the kind of feature creep that is against the philosophy of vim (or at least vi). You're more likely to be happy with adding your own layer of indirection between vim and an external doodling app. As #Mats Petersson suggests, a URL is one way. Or a filename relative to some directory, or an XML tag.
A plugin for vim that recognizes your layer might automatically display your doodles. If Clippy can be implemented as a vim plugin, surely so can this.
If ascii-art suffices, try the plugin DrawIt, http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=40 ; or use that webpage's search box.
Related
I am currently playing with latest Sitecore, just downloaded from SDN. The first, but quite annoying "feature" in new metro-like interface seems to be huge UX elements, big paddings in content tree between elements (it also quite ugly in Templates Builder). Also just restored a package of my existing solution (taken from 7.2) and I find it very inconvenient to use, as the one is quite big with many items.
Is there any way to switch it back to previous interface? Am also quite worrying about adapting our business users as I spent much time on justifying version upgrade and this type of people do usually judge by what they see.
I clearly understand your feelings as I had exactly the same first impression.
I dont think there is some switch to return to previous UI.
Nevertheless, it is all about themes. Default theme that is located at sitecore\shell\Themes\Standard\Default folder, so playing enough with developer tools or firebug you may produce any look-and-feel you want.
I have adjusted Sitecore 8 styles in order to fit both my visual expectations and general good look. To make it simple, I have created the module that replaces those dodgy styles with properly adjusted, to make it look similar to Sitecore 7.
Please read the blog post describing how to implement that; there also will be download link to that package:
http://blog.martinmiles.net/post/is-that-possible-to-cure-sitecore-8-styles-megalomania
The module replaces following style files from folder mentioned above:
Content Manager.css
Default.css
GlobalHeader.css
Ribbon.css
Shell.css
Startbar.css
Windows.css
Workbox.css
Hope this helps!
Update: Thank you for inspiring me with an idea of switch. I think it may make sense of implementing a SPEAK component, that allow to switch between conservative and new styles.
Lightweight markup languages offer a fixed set of features. This feature set is growing, but every time I write a more complex article, I have to realize something is missing. Examples include: proper image captions, table of figures, file include, cross-references, etc. So I end up creating a tool chain around it, with a Makefile and tricky sed commands.
I typically want to insert ad-hoc markers into my text and process them later. They can be one-liners, or more complex -- and this where the whole regex approach fails. Here is a snippet of an imaginary markup.
I can generate an image from an external dot file [.myDot diag.dot The process],
and it will be included with a caption.
Or the dot source is right here [.myDotHere
foo->bar->Done;
]
I'm looking for a markup tool which can be easily extended to suite my ad-hoc needs. The options I found so far
Makefile, pre- and postprocessing with sed/perl scripts
Built in regex pre-processing in txt2tags
Pandoc parses markdown into an internal AST which can be transformed with haskell scripts
So what I'm looking for is
a language designed with customization and extensibility in mind
lightweight; no TeX/LaTeX please
not something which handles all my specific issues, but not extensible
My output is usually just html, so it doesn't have to support many targets
I created Glyph with extensibility in mind. You can create your own macros either using Glyph itself or Ruby.
Glyph aims to make publishing easier while giving all possible control to the writer, it can manage book metadata, ToC, internal links, snippets, etc. etc.
For documentation on all its features check out the Glyph book, which was created using Glyph itself.
Your "toolchain" approach is a good one - You won't IMO find a single project that will handle your specific needs, best to follow the *nix philosophy and use the best tool for the job that plugs into your open toolchain.
If macro inclusion is an issue, don't worry about solving that by your choice of markup syntax - find the right tool for that specific job and use it upstream.
The choice of markup should be IMO based on the availability of transformation tools to your desired output. IMO Pandoc is by far the most actively developed project in this space, and very flexible, especially with its scripting facility. Note it's also very well supported in GoogleGroups - John will likely respond directly and quickly to any issues you may have.
Note that Pandoc's flexibility also means your master source text isn't as "locked in", as you can easily convert for example from its extended markdown syntax to reST, if say you wanted to take advantage of Sphinx's or DocBook's capabilities. (BTW also check out AsciiDoc, which the latest Pandoc outputs - apparently a reader is also in the works)
Check out Pandoc's "extras" wiki page, I've been particularly excited by the ConTeXt filter script; I'm not sure if it'll be a good fit for you, but it includes some macro include capabilities, and IMO nothing will give you better typographical control.
I have discovered Scintilla/Notepad++ API this week end.
As there is a nice Template vcproj for Notepad++ Plugins available on line then I could start to play with some pseudo code-source really really fastly.
I have just looked briefly at the Scintilla documentation which expose the API which looks promising. Sometimes it is still hazy for me, sometimes not as feature-full as I expect/dream, but that's really meaningless details for now.
So now it is time I experiment with a language of my fancy, for the moment I nickname it "Entity". And what best to do than design a light IDE for it.
So I am going to invest much time in Notepad++/Scintilla environement.
I have have not thought about using Emacs because I never got accustomed to it.
But if you use another type of Text Editor API than Scintilla, preferably in C++ since it is my language experience... what other Text Editor API would you use/have you used ?
Just want to be sure of my choice before diving deeper.
I found Scintilla to be very feature-packed, and covered everything I needed. You have to do a bit of work to get all the functionality out of it (ensuring that keyboard short-cuts perform the desired effect, etceteras), but it was incredibly easy to compile, include and get working, though as I said you have to do a bit of legwork to get everything out of it, but this is better than having to tear your hair out getting an "all-purpose" control to stop doing something you don't want to. It is as if the authors have given you a toolbox to work with.
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I've had it of those dozens of editors which never provides simple things like:
distinguish type keywords and instruction keywords so I can put different colors on them.
being cross platform using a standard GUI lib like qt gtk etc (notepad++, yes, I almost hate you).
enough keyboard shortcut like duplicate line, comment selection, and a decent find-replace.
Decent task-easing features like single-click-on-the-number-line-margin to select the entire line.
Scintilla or another good-enough lexer that highlights enough different things, because brain-compiling code is one thing, quickly identify with the eyes what is what is something I find important.
I just want to support very basic languages like C, C++, maybe Python, not HTML or CSS.
Is Scintilla a good choice to just highlight those languages, and is a lexer really necessary ?
Isn't QT enough to program a text editor such as the one I want to do ? I know there is QScintilla, but is there a reason I shouldn't use a lib that integrates a lexer ? Why is Scintilla such a good lib ?
Is QT a good choice for such an editor ? (I also want to hard embed ProFont in the editor to kill any reluctant font problem between OSes).
EDIT:
In short, I want to make an editor, only with the same syntax highlight features of notepad++. That's my main goal, and the use of QScintilla might be a little harder than I thought...
EDIT2:
Well I found textadept, it's not so known but is quite awesome. I didn't manage to make my lexer, since I have other to do which I do under windows, unfortunately it's slow on the mac. Apparently there isn't any Scite official build for the mac.
C++ is not a "very basic language" by any stretch of the imagination.
Why do you really want to do this? There are SOOO many open source code editors out there.
If you must write your own editor, I suggest looking at the other open source editors and examine which pieces you port to your editor.
Porting pieces of existing working and tested code is usually much better than writing your own code and debugging it.
After perusing a couple serious open source editors: Emacs, Eclips, CodeBlocks, CodeLight, etc., I believe you will start changing your mind about writing an editor from scratch.
-- Thomas Matthews
My Info
If you really want to do this (and it sounds like a lot of work) I would look at ANTLR for parsing the code. You may get some ideas from their ANTLRWorks display.
To link the parse tree to a display could be a fair amount of work so I'd see what an IDE platform such as Eclipse has to offer
Are you OK with Java?
If so, go for Eclipse technologies: SWT and JFace. The latter provides you with org.eclipse.jface.text package with a lot of features. Then you can roll own editor easily basing on that. (I prefer Eclipse-based editors to Scintilla-based, I believe they tend to be more advanced and feature-rich, but that's my personal opinion.)
But then, you might want to go a step further and use the Eclipse RCP framework for you application... But then why not use the Eclipse IDE itself and just add whatever you want as plug-ins.
The Eclipse codebase is huge and it's up to you how much you want to reuse.
I would expend some effort experimenting with the emacs colour theme package and the various langauge modes; see if you can bend the lisp to do what you want. You almost certainly can. to my mind emacs and a bit of effort on your part will get you your ultimate editor (remember emacs is really just a DIY editor toolkit). If you cant bend emacs into the shape you want you will be well placed to expend the effort in writing your own.
I have tried to do something similar myself for a project I'm working on at the moment, I looked into the QScintilla and had to remove it from my project because when you embedded inside a QGraphicsView I can't control the resolution of the widgets image, it seems to paint the text as an image and that's what we see, I played with increasing the smoothness of the QFont and that improved it but still a no-go.
So I found a simple code editor inside QT's code base it comes with every installation of QT if you look
into:
C:\Qt\4.7.3\src\scripttools\debugging\qscriptedit.h
C:\Qt\4.7.3\src\scripttools\debugging\qscriptedit.cpp
If you go to the source code of OpenShapeFactory where I'm trying to embed a Code Editor: check how I got the syntax Highlighter and the autocomplete :
this widget uses the qscriptedit widget that ships with qt, you can add your own keywords to the syntax hightlighter from a file as well as for the auto-complete dropdownlist.
this is the header, scriptwidget.h and the implementation scriptwidget.cpp are available as part of the whole project code.
the next stage is to look into the QTCreator and see the code they already have all if not most of these features after you get to compile their version, just find where to add your little mods and you might be getting closer to the simple code editor.
I wish you the best of luck on this direction and if you find a solution please send it over, :)
heads-up keep a lookout for the repository link above, if I find a way of making it first, I might chase you to the answer.
Like everyone else is saying, it's probably more trouble than it's worth, but if you really want to do it, Qt's a good choice since it's cross platform. Use QSyntaxHighlighter to do your keyword/type highlighting, and take full advantage Qt's support for keyboard shortcuts.
use something like C, QT and Lua for the scripting engine.
A sort of follow up/related question to this.
I'm trying to get a grip on a large code base that has hundreds and hundreds of classes and a large inheritance hierarchy. I want to be able to see the "main veins" of the inheritance hierarchy at a glance - not all the "peripheral" classes that only do some very specific / specialized thing. Visual Studio's "View Class Diagram" makes something that looks like a train and its sprawled horizontally across the screen and isn't very organized. You can't grok it easily.
I've just tried doxygen and graphviz but the results are .. somewhat similar to Visual Studio. I'm getting sweet looking call graphs but again too much detail for what I'm trying to get.
I need a quick way to generate the inheritance hierarchy, in some kind of collapsible view.
Why not just do it manually, it is a great learning experience when starting to work with a large code base. I usually just look at what class inherits from what, and what class contain what instances, references or pointers to other classes. Have a piece of paper next to you and get drawing...
Instead of going into the full Class Designer tool, just use the "Class View" or the "Object Browser" in Visual Studio - they present fully collapsible class heirarchies.
A good UML tool should do the trick.
Here is a list of generic UMl tools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UML_tools
There are lots out there, all with varying feature sets. Try playing with a few to see if you get the output you desire. If they free ones fail you, you might have to shell out for a good commercial grade UML tool
You can try CppDepend, it doesn't create a class hierarchy like Doxygen does but it can show 'the big picture' for your project, it also shows some code metrics.
I've had most success with valgrind and kcachegrind to do this. You run valgrind against your debugging binary, perform whatever actions your interested in, then import the output into kcachegrind to see everything you'd ever want to know about who called what, how often, and when. Plus, because your doing it dynamically, it catches cases that static analysis likely wont.
I've also had some success using Enterprise Architect's reverse engineering features, although this doesn't end up nearly as nicely (but you get a workable UML model which is nice!).
And finally, a tool called "Understand". This is pretty good at static OO analysis, but I think quite pricey and not that widely used.
Try Source Insight it is possible to configure the depth of the generated graph in this tool.
See also C/C++ call-graph utility for Windows platform
Check out SourceNavigator, it's open source, works on a bunch of platforms and has a Hierarchy Browser, a Class Browser, a Cross-Reference Browser and more that will allow you navigate and understand the code.
I'm using it for some time now especially when I have new code to go through and understand.
For a reasonably priced commercial product, you may want to check out SolidSX from Vizlogix (www.vizlogix.com). (If you are outside of North America, go to SolidSource -- www.solidsourceit.com.)
It generates a radial diagram that can be collapsed and expanded. It also integrates with Visual Studio (both BSC and .NET).
What's your definition of 'main vein'? You either want a graph reducer or skeletizer (you could find or write one and apply it to what Doxygen and the rest produce) or, 'main vein' has something to do with the function of the code and, I don't think an automated tool can help you with that. Unless you can point out to it 'These are the important bits that do input and output, show me only elements that are one or two steps away from the paths between these'. Hum, sounds like a cool tool to write :)
... the inheritance hierarchy, in some kind of collapsible view.
again, a sweet idea for a tool!