Friday, October 25, 2013

Spell Checking in Eclipse / LiClipse 0.8.0

Well, one thing that I set to do was adding spell-checking to LiClipse, so, the first thing to note is that although the Eclipse platform does have that notion, there's only a default implementation on JDT and not on the platform (see: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=185695 for the request).

So, I guess that the platform guys do have lots of other priorities, so, I ended up extracting the code from JDT into a new plugin -- the code lives at: https://github.com/fabioz/eclipse.spellchecker (it's pretty much just getting the JDT code into a new repo and making it compile -- hopefully sometime it's removed from JDT and goes into the platform, but I know that may still take a lot of time... and maybe living as a separate plugin is a better option after all). Anyway, it's now integrated by default in LiClipse so that LiClipse-based editors can have spell checking (by default, every partition which maps to the string color will have spell checking enabled, but it's possible to customize it -- see:  http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/spell_checking.html for details).

 Also, I've just released LiClipse 0.8.0. One of the nicest things is that now adding a language or editing an existing one should refresh the internal structure automatically, just requiring an editor restart to get the latest changes (previously on some situations this didn't happen properly), so, it's pretty straightforward to create a new language without ever closing LiClipse.

Creating a language is also streamlined, so, from the preferences > LiClipse and right-clicking one of the links to a directory tracked or by using the context menu on a file > languages there are options to create a new language on a directory tracked for language files.

Enjoy!

Fabio

LiClipse Homepage: http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/
More details on release: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/liclipse/RjXAHwTqtKA

Thursday, October 3, 2013

First LiClipse public release

The first LiClipse public release is now available!

It just came out of Alpha (when it was only available for supporters of the crowdfunding campaign that got the perks to use it before the public release).

Its homepage: http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/ has details on where to get it.

So, what do Eclipse users gain from it?

Well, there are 3 major features which I think make it very attractive:

1. Theming: LiClipse extends the features from Eclipse Color Theme to theme the whole IDE and not only the editors, so, dark themes look nice in the IDE.

2. Multiple region edition: The basic concept for this is already available on a number of editors when renaming with Ctrl+2, R, which links multiple regions with the same text for edition, but LiClipse takes this concept to the next level, enabling multiple areas to be selected and edited in various ways.

It's hard to explain it properly, so, I created video showing this feature (and the HTML editor): http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/multi_edition_video.html -- but be warned: after using it for a while, it can be really hard not having it anymore!

3. Support for multiple languages: Out of the box, LiClipse currently supports 10 different languages (CoffeScript, C++, CSS, Django Templates, HTML, JavaScript, Python, RST, SCSS and XML), but it should be easy to add support to new languages (by creating a proper .liclipse file and adding it to plugins\com.brainwy.liclipse.editor\languages, more details at: http://brainwy.github.io/liclipse/supported_languages.html).

Also, it's worth to note that it's HTML editor has gotten special attention so far and IMO it's already among the best editors for HTML (and the Django Templates inherits from it!).

Enjoy!

Friday, March 15, 2013

How will LiClipse be done?

One thing I've been asked some times about the current funding on keeping PyDev alive and creating LiClipse (http://igg.me/at/liclipse) is what will LiClipse base itself on (BTW, LiClipse is a short for Lightweight Eclipse).

Just to note, the major features planned are available at: http://igg.me/at/liclipse, but it's really light on how to achieve the support for the various editors and how it's it related to existing technologies, so, I plan to give you some information on that below...

I believe that the main technologies regarding that in Eclipse itself are DLTK and Xtext.


So, let's see: as far as Xtext goes, I think its approach is a bit heavyweight for what I'm planning, as the idea would be customizing the editor without relying on creating new plugins nor actually programming (note that Xtext may give you more things -- namely a context aware code-completion --  if you take the time to actually specify a language as it'd like, but unfortunately, from my experiments, doing that is not trivial).


As for DLTK, I think it may have a larger overlap -- in the editor UI, what I'm planning could probably be a building block for DLTK (and maybe Xtext) itself (and it could probably reuse a good part of DLTK, especially as far as the editor itself goes, so, it should be possible to do some refactors so that the base is used by both -- and for more advanced extensions -- where I'm thinking on extending with actual plugins -- there's probably more overlap, but note that although I definitely want that wider integration and providing back as EPL to the community, it may depend on the amount of funding I'm able to get)...


Think something closer to other all-purpose editors (as opposed to IDEs), such as Notepad++, Vi, TextMate, Sublime, etc (i.e.: the idea is supporting lots of languages out of the box, so, the idea is having it resembling formats such as ultraedit wordfiles or TextMate language files -- depending on how the funding goes, maybe I'll provide some way to convert from those formats too).




Thursday, March 14, 2013

First Post

Ok, I'm the PyDev author, so, usually I posted everything on http://pydev.blogspot.com. My main topics are usually on PyDev itself and sometimes on Python and Eclipse...

Now, I'm going to change this a bit: I'll be posting things on Eclipse (and the hopefully funded LiClipse effort: http://igg.me/at/liclipse, which I believe should affect the whole Eclipse ecosystem) at this blog (http://liclipse.blogspot.com)