Tuesday, October 6, 2015

LiClipse 2.4.0 (Critical fix for TextMate bundles and PyDev update)

The latest LiClipse (2.4.0) is now available to download.

The major fix was in the integration with TextMate bundles, which was applying some indent rules when the user didn't really add a new line.

Also, this version adds support for RAML (http://raml.org/).

Besides that, the bundled PyDev was upgraded to the latest version, which had some nice improvements such as improved ansi colors in the interactive console, more information when all elements were filtered out in the PyDev Package Explorer, code completion improvements, etc.

See http://liclipse.com for more information on LiClipse and http://pydev.org for PyDev.

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Improved TextMate bundles integration and instant searches on Eclipse (LiClipse 2.3.0)

Yeap, LiClipse 2.3.0 is out now.

The main change in this release was a restructuring on how the parsing works...

This deserves some better explanation: in Eclipse, the default parsing structure is done by separating a document in many top-level partitions and later on those partitions are scanned to give syntax highlighting.

The issue here is that in LiClipse when parsing with TextMate rules, a single parse will provide all the information at once (top-level partitions and internal scopes in the partition), so, the code was restructured so that a single parse is done and the information is properly saved to be accessed later on, so, a single parse will provide the partitions, colors, outline, etc.

This means that LiClipse became even more responsive, especially when dealing with TextMate rules and the scope information is available to better support TextMate snippets for code-completion.

Also, the searching structure created on LiClipse 2.2.0 was ironed out (and its really pleasant getting instant searches even on big codebases).

Enjoy!

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

Improved search capabilities on Eclipse (LiClipse 2.2.0)

LiClipse 2.2.0 (just released) introduces improved search capabilities for Eclipse.

This is done by leveraging Lucene for indexing the files searched -- it's interesting to note that the index is built (and checked for consistency) on-the-fly when a text search is requested, which means that the indexing won't add any overhead on the build process (although that means that the first time some scope is searched it may take a bit more time to build the indexes -- but still comparable to a regular text search on Eclipse -- and subsequent calls are nearly instant).

The image below shows the search dialog (activated through Ctrl + H), where it's possible to select what/where to search. The path(s) and project(s) are updated when a search is requested based on the current selection.


The search results page also offers additional flexibility, which allows grouping the matches in different ways -- they can be flattened, grouped by project, folder or files -- and filtering the results based on the paths (multiple terms may be comma-separated and "!" can be used in the beginning of the term to exclude matches).


Also, this release adds support out of the box for Linux Shell files, Windows bat files, PERL and Swift (through TextMate bundles), so, 27 languages are available out of the box now (View supported languages).

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Eclipse and TextMate bundles support (LiClipse 2.1 released)

LiClipse 2.1 now marks a significant milestone as it enables users to have syntax highlighting for almost any language available (that is, any language which has a related TextMate bundle can now be used in LiClipse/Eclipse).

The major portion of this update is related to syntax highlighting support and snippets (if the snippet matches the top-level grammar scope... future releases should improve on that so that it recognizes the more 'elaborate' scope selectors from TextMate).

Installing a bundle should be pretty simple (mostly put a zipped file with a '.tmbundle' extension in a tracked folder... http://www.liclipse.com/textmate_bundles.html has more details).

New languages supported out of the box now include PHP, Ruby and Markdown (through TextMate bundles).

Also, the LiClipse standalone is now based on 4.5 (actually 4.5rc2a), so, it's text search is much faster and its dark theme has nice improvements too (in both flavors: Eclipse 4 theme / LiClipse theme).

Enjoy ;)

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

LiClipse 2.0 released (Nim, Go and Jinja2 supported!)

LiClipse just turned 2.0 -- along with PyDev 4.0 :)

The main highlights for this release are: Nim, Go and Jinja2 are now supported.



Multi-page editors (such as the plugins manifest editor) now also have multiple cursors and vertical indent guides support.



The JavaScript editor had improvements in the syntax highlighting and its code-formatting settings can now be tweaked (http://www.liclipse.com/customize_javascript.html has more details).

Different jshint.js and beautify.js files may be specified in preferences > LiClipse > JavaScript.

From this release onwards, besides providing standalone binaries and a downloadable update site, LiClipse provides an actual online update site: http://update.liclipse.com/latest -- note that I still recommend users to use the standalone as it's easier to get started and it also provides updates to the underlying eclipse SDK, but the update site is now available if you have a working Eclipse version which you don't want to change.

This was also the first time where I transferred some technology from LiClipse to Eclipse (to make improvements so that the trees in the dark theme in Eclipse on Windows actually have arrows you can work with: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=434201 -- and hopefully I'll still be able to make time to integrate another one to improve the selections on trees/tables for the next Eclipse release: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=434309).

A note for existing users: a renew license currently has a 50% discount over the price of a full license http://www.liclipse.com/buy.html -- thank you for helping in keeping LiClipse going strong!


Friday, February 6, 2015

LiClipse 1.4.0: Themed scrollbars for StyledText!

LiClipse 1.4.0 has just been released.

The major feature in this release is that scrollbars for StyledText editors are now themed by default, as the image below shows:



Besides this, the default encoding for the files/workspace is now UTF-8 (regardless of the OS being used).

PyDev, which was also updated to the latest version, now features an interactive console prompt along with the console view where the scrollbar theming makes things much smoother:


Thursday, January 8, 2015

LiClipse 1.3.0 (Open at specific line / YAML syntax checking)

A new LiClipse is now available!

This version adds support for opening a file at a specific line (and optionally column).

I've also fixed this in Eclipse itself and submitted a pull request: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=305336 / https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/38830 (although so far it seems no committer had a chance to look at it), so, hopefully the next version of Eclipse will have it too.

Also, the integrated YAML version was updated so that errors in the YAML file will be shown as error markers.

To finish, this LiClipse release updated a lot of the components it builds upon, so, it's now distributed with the latest Java 8 version (no more permgen exceptions!), Eclipse 4.4.1, latest PyDev, EGit, AnyEdit...

As a note for those using LiClipse for python development, PyDev can now save the settings per-project or per-user (and not just per workspace) -- still not all, but enough to be usable :)

It takes a different approach from the regular Eclipse installations because instead of adding new preferences pages to the project it changed the existing preferences pages and adds the option to save the preferences you're viewing to the project/user settings or workspace (as the image below shows).

It allows saving the preferences to multiple projects at once and showing the preferences from a selected project (or you can just open the preferences location and edit it manually -- in YAML format).