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!