LiClipse 11: newer PyDev and on to new Eclipse base (4.30)

 LiClipse 11 is now out and includes the newer version of PyDev, which has a whole new debugging mode using sys.monitoring (which translates to a much faster debugging experience overall -- see: https://pydev.blogspot.com/2024/02/pydev-debugger-and-sysmonitoring-pep.html for more details).

Also, it is now based on Eclipse 4.30 -- this time it was actually quite tricky as there are some internal changes to Eclipse itself which had to be changed in a bunch of places (the @Inject is now from jakarta instead of javax and the orbit aggregation site changed).

One pretty important note I haven't commented before is that now LiClipse is signed on Mac OS too (not just Windows). 

Unfortunately Eclipse suffers a bit from that because after signing it's expected that nothing inside the .app will change. This means that quite some work was done so that .pyc files are not created inside the app anymore and nothing changes there -- unfortunately at this points additional plugins on top of LiClipse can not be installed when using Mac OS (I'm still researching on alternative approaches here).

On a separate note, it's been quite a while since I haven't posted about LiClipse itself... I guess this boils down to the fact that most of the work ends up happening on PyDev or LiClipseText directly -- but rest assured that work is indeed happening here 😉!

LiClipse 7.1.0 released (improved Dark theme, LiClipseText and PyDev updates)

I'm happy to announce that LiClipse 7.1.0 is now available for download.

LiClipse is now based on Eclipse 4.17 (2020-09), one really nice features is that this now enables dark-scrollbars for trees on Windows.

I think an image may be worth a thousand words here, so below is a screenshot showing how the LiClipse Dark theme looks like (on Windows) with the changes!

This release also updates PyDev to 8.1.0, which provides support for Python 3.9 as well as quick-fixes to convert strings to f-strings, among many other things (see: https://pydev.blogspot.com/2020/12/pydev-810-released-python-39-code.html for more details).

Another upgraded dependency is LiClipseText 2.2.0, which now provides grammars to support TypeScript, RobotFramework and JSON by default.

LiClipse 6.0.0 released

LiClipse 6.0.0 is now out.

The main changes is that many dependencies have been updated:

- it's now based on Eclipse 4.13 (2019-09), which is a pretty nice upgrade (in my day-to-day use I find it appears smoother than previous versions, although I know this sounds pretty subjective).

- PyDev was updated to 7.4.0, so, Python 3.8 (which was just released) is now already supported.

Enjoy!

LiClipse 5.2.2 released

This version does an updated of the main dependencies of LiClipse.

It's now based on:

• Eclipse 4.11 (also named 2019-03)
• PyDev (5.2.2) 
• EGit (5.3.0)

As a note, it seems I haven't updated this blog as often as I should (I end up putting more effort into announcing the PyDev updates) but just to note, LiClipse is always updated whenever PyDev is updated.

Enjoy!

LiClipse 4.5.2 released

LiClipse 4.5.2 is now out.

The major updates are related  to the upgrade of dependencies (such as PyDev and EGit).

On the PyDev front, the major change is initial support for getting type information from .pyi files and a critical fix for the creation of the preferences page.

For EGit, https://wiki.eclipse.org/EGit/New_and_Noteworthy/4.11 has more details!

Enjoy!

Macro keyboard recording on Eclipse / LiClipse 4.3.1

I'm currently working on a new engine for record and playback of keyboard macros in Eclipse. It's currently available as a project in the Eclipse incubation (see https://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Macros for more details and how to install it to Eclipse) and I hope it'll be a part of Eclipse 4.8 -- the current version should be stable already, but it needs some hardening, so, feedback is appreciated ;)

Also, I decided to integrate it into LiClipse too (so, the new 4.3.1 release of LiClipse adds support to record and playback of macros).

The idea is that this will fix a long standing (and popular) feature request in Eclipse -- https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=8519 -- and a pet peeve on mine too as it's not uncommon for me to copy a file to notepad++ to make a record/playback and then copy it back to Eclipse... this really should be builtin (as a note, the rectangular edition in Eclipse, multiple cursors in LiClipse  and regexps in the find dialog do solve a number of use-cases, but I find that record/playback on some cases is invaluable).

Now, why not just use https://sourceforge.net/projects/practicalmacro/? Well, I've used it some times but unfortunately I didn't find it as stable as I wanted -- it's really hard to come up with a stable record of what's happening in Eclipse -- so, I think an effective solution must really be builtin to Eclipse in order to be effective.

Also, in order to be feasible, there are some limitations in the scope on what it should accomplish: it's not a general Eclipse IDE record/playback, but rather a record/playback in the scope of an editor, so, it should properly record/playback the keystrokes in the editor and the resulting actions from such commands (although the implementation is done in a way which could support more general recording in Eclipse, but this would require changing many other parts of the IDE to be aware of the macro record/playback, so, I'm not sure it'd be feasible).

This means that some particular implementations which don't work through commands will have to be adapted -- so, for instance, record in the find dialog currently doesn't work because it doesn't work through commands and there's no way to listen that a find action was actually triggered from there... right now, the workaround is using the Incremental Find (Ctrl+J) and Find Next (Ctrl+K) commands when on record mode (my idea is taking a look at it after the macro record/playback engine is integrated to core Eclipse as I don't think it's a blocker due to having a proper workaround through actual commands), the focus now is making it solid for record and playback of commands which are related to the text editor.

So, that's it, hope you enjoy macro recording on LiClipse 4.3.1 -- and hopefully on Eclipse itself later on ;)

LiClipse 4.1.1 / LiClipseText 2.0.0

Ok, the new versions of LiClipse (4.1.1) and LiClipseText (2.0.0) are now out.

This version had many changes, the major one being that LiClipseText now reuses the same engine that tm4e uses for parsing code when based on a TextMate grammar (which is is a translation from the same engine used in VSCode), so, hopefully this should iron out most issues when dealing with TextMate grammars.

Also, it can now parse in a thread to prevent the UI from becoming unresponsive (although it'll only really do that if there are too many changes for it to parse).

There were also improvements in the definition being used for JavaScript, so, parsing should be *much* faster (although this was done at the expense of not showing some entries in the outline) -- but as on JavaScript having huge files isn't uncommon, the big performance gain, should be worth it.

Aside from that, the standalone is now based on Eclipse 4.7 (final) and PyDev was also updated for 5.9.2, which brought enhancements such as the new debugging approach using bytecode modification with the new Python 3.6 hooks and isort integration, besides a critical fix to the Lucene integration, which affected users which used a different plugin which also used Lucene but on a different version.

So, if you're a LiClipse user, hurry to http://www.liclipse.com/download.html to get the new version!