CodeAssistor - version 8 final released

It's taken me like 8 months, but the codeassistor now has tabs.

Why did it take me so long, because things are crazy at work (good crazy, QNX is awesome to work with).

Get your binaries here

Windows
Macintosh
Linux
Source Code

CodeAssistor on Windows - Tab version now beta

Ok, so a few more tweaks and we have a feature complete tabbed editor:) yay

Two features you'll notice I left out of the windows version
1) tear out a tab into a new window
2) tear a tab and place it in an already existing window

These two things are more effort than they are worth, so I wont be implementing them any time soon.

Get your binary here and let the bughunt begin!

Tabbing on windows, damn that was a lot of work :(

I've been working, since my last post, on getting some sort of tabbing for CodeAssistor on windows... my god was it a lot of work, and my codebase has become absolutely spaghetti :( oh well.

I got something that works... Alpha quality, as there are many more interactions that I simply cannot test yet, but anyways, if you want to give it a spin

here

And dont forget the Mac-Beta quality (I haven't found any serious bugs from regular usage yet)
here

CodeAssistor on Mac - Tabs version is beta quality

The mac version of codeAssistor with tabbing is beta quality

get it here

OMG Seriously? Yes Seriously

If any of you have done mac programming, you've probably pondered this one question "how do I get tabs like firefox/safari/chrome without doing much heavy lifting"

If you haven't, heres a user exercise. Go to xcode and see what you can get done with an NSTabView... go head, I'll wait.

If you want a hint, here is what you can do.
But finally, some smart guy has come to rescue us from our misery.

Rasmus Andersson

you are my new hero.

Rasmus is the primary developer for Kod - a Mac based programmers editor. As part of Kod, he has developed a project called Chromium-Tabs, which basically gives programmers a nice - easy to use - API for creating beautiful browser like tabs (some say they look like Chrome).

So, I've promptly made a makefile so I dont have to deal with that nasty xCode IDE (yuck!), and integrated the Chromium-Tabs framework into my CodeAssistor project. Now I have a nice beautiful looking TABBED editor :)

All in all, the makefile took me 5 hours, and learing-integrating chromium tabs into codeassistor took 14/15 more.

If you want to play with the Alpha release of 0.0.8 (Mac Only so far), here you go

EDIT: Kod and Chromium Tabs Source

CodeAssistor - Command Entry Implemented

So for the past week I've added the Command Entry to CodeAssistor.

Right now I've only implemented the search/replace functionality, but the framework now exists to start adding all sorts of awesomeness

So how does it work?

Open up a file and press the ESC key. You'll notice the entry popup

type '/' to start searching, then type in a regular expression (thats right, I said regular expression!)
eg "/#define (.*?) " (thats a space after the (.*?) , dont include the quote marks)

This will find the first #define XXX (but only #define XXX even if there is a #define XXX YYY)
Press ENTER. You've now moved to the next occurrence.

So what about replacing?

Ok continue your Command Entry so that the string looks like
"/#define (.+?) (.*)$/#ifdef \1\n#undef \1\n#endif\n#define \1 \2"
you'll notice that this doesn't replace. It's important to give the user a method of writing out the full regular expression and replacement string.

To actually replace the find add a final "/" to the command entry string... like this:
"/#define (.+?) (.*)$/#ifdef \1\n#undef \1\n#endif\n#define \1 \2/"

The library I am using for regular expressions (the basic scintilla regular expressions derived from Ozan Yigit's library plus some '?' extensions I did myself) doesn't (yet) understand the | metacharacter, so you'll have to write a separate line for "/#define ([^\s]+)$" (aka empty macros)

Half a Days labour

Hello Source fans!

I just realized a nice anecdotal metric due to some CodeAssitor work I did today.

I noticed when I sat down to work on some regular expression stuff for CA that it was ~1:30 in the afternoon, for some flakey reason, my brain made a mental timestamp. When I finished the feature I was working on I noticed that the time wasy ~5:30.

What's interesting is I completed one whole feature (or at least got the feature from 0 to code complete... which means there hasn't been extensive testing), and quite literally nothing else (no washing breaks, no coffee reheats, no email checking, nothing but code.

The day previous I worked on adding the 0-1 quantifier (?) to Scintilla's basic Regular expression code (RESearch.cxx), and got that feature code complete... unfortunately I didn't notice the time and I was very distracted watching the Chilean miners get free (CHI-CHI-CH LEI-LEI-LEI!), and was doing numerous other things.

Anyway... So I sit down in front of my computer to work on some CodeAssistor stuff and notice the time is 1:34. I check the Scintilla Mailing list to see someone had posted a reply to my ? quantifier work, and someone had. Here is Philippe's email:

On 13/10/2010 20:36, Michael Mullin wrote:
> I've added a small patch to add the ? operator to the built in regular
> expressions in the scintilla version used in CodeAssistor. I haven't
> done any extensive testing, so I guess this is a bit of a 'code
> review.'
> Anyone see bugs? Do you think this patch is useful for the main
> scintilla branch?


Yes, if it works... For this, you should:
- Fix indentation...
- Add documentation of the new operator in the documentation at the start of the file.
The semantic of the operator isn't clear. From a quick glance at the code, it looks like
it is used in place of * with the meaning of 0 or 1 occurrence of the previous token, not
as a modifier to make an operator non-greedy, right?
The latter would be more useful, but it much harder (if possible) to inject in the current
engine. The former can still be useful, though...
--
Philippe Lhoste
-- (near) Paris -- France
-- http://Phi.Lho.free.fr
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

So for the next 4 hours I
1) added the lazy operator functionality
2) did up the spacing how he wanted + documentation

Anyways, it was 5:27 when I finished.

The most interesting part of this endeavor is that you can see just exactly what I accomplished during those 4 hours.

Anyways, I thought this was an interesting piece of data. Especially because I wasn't planning on timing myself, so I didn't change my work effort at all.

Note: its 5:44 as I finish this blog.

CodeAssistor meets Joel on Softwares "12 steps to better code"

Last night I fixed a crash in CodeAssistor (see: https://bugs.launchpad.net/codeassistor/+bug/647139). compiled the code, and released the binary to launchpad.

I wake up and read this article by "Software Joel" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html and get to point 2 "Can you make a build in one step"

By this I mean: how many steps does it take to make a shipping build from the latest source snapshot? On good teams, there's a single script you can run that does a full checkout from scratch, rebuilds every line of code, makes the EXEs, in all their various versions, languages, and #ifdef combinations, creates the installation package, and creates the final media -- CDROM layout, download website, whatever. If the process takes any more than one step, it is prone to errors. And when you get closer to shipping, you want to have a very fast cycle of fixing the "last" bug, making the final EXEs, etc. If it takes 20 steps to compile the code, run the installation builder, etc., you're going to go crazy and you're going to make silly mistakes

Crazy thing is, I ran into this problem this morning! I had to come into work and put in some "overtime," while I am here I'll get the latest CodeAssistor to work with. Unfortunately, I forgot a critical step in the build process... I forgot to type STATIC=yes on the make command. Thus the build required Scintilla as Dynamic libraries, which I of course, didn't add to the zip file.

Thus codeAssistor-v0.0.7-winExe-alpha4.zip is unrunable. DOH

I'll have to create some sort of "make distribution" command.

CA update

external editor updates feature complete in linux (thats all platforms), autoindent feature added due to request.

CodeAssistor - external editor notification on windows

feature complete on the update stuff for mac and windows.... linux todo.

CodeAssistor - external editor notification on mac

When an external editor (or application such as touch) touches the file you are working on in CodeAssistor, the program now pops up a message asking if you would like to discard your changes and reload from the harddrive

Whyfor CodeAssistor?

Time for some introspection. Why did I create the CodeAssistor? Isn't there lots of text editors? Why Open Source? What have I learned about Open Source so far?

Initial Inspiration (the itch!)

It was late 2009, and I was interested in looking at the Android RIL code. I work for research in motion on the QCT radio team and was interested in how Android did their system determination stuff for multimode devices. I wanted to look at some of their source and compare against some of the code that I work on everyday. I downloaded the code and started using "xed" to view the source. Xed was my only editor that I had on my Mac at the time.

(BTW, all the really interesting code is hidden from you in Android, at the time Qualcomm had not open sourced the libraries underneath the basic high level stuff... I seriously doubt that they've open sourced the interesting stuff even now... a word of warning for those of you who hold up Android as a pinnacle of freedom and open sourced software... I wasn't able to glean any useful information)

Xed is the editor component for the xCode IDE created by Apple, and although xCode has some terrific components xed started to annoy me for two reasons:

1. when you run xed, you start up the whole xCode IDE - This takes time to load, sometimes 5-8 seconds. Since Im not working on the code itself, I am simply reading it I didn't want a full IDE, and I wanted some snappy performance, so I could open/close source files quickly
2. xed uses a different look and feel from all other editors I've used - It's rather hard to describe the look/feel of xed, for those of you who have used xed, you'll know what I mean. While other people may like how xed runs, I wanted something more traditional.

So I downloaded some other editors. I tried TextWrangler first. With TextWrangler I found some bugs relating to opening files from a state where the application is not running... I'd have to open the file twice! Very annoying. Its not open source, so I felt no compultion to submit bug reports (if you are Cathedral style, you're bugs are your own). I then tried Mac ports for VI and eMacs... but I dont really know how to use those editors (I can survive on vi, but I dont want to... I am completely lost in emacs), so they were out. Then I tried jEdit. jEdit was pretty good, but it has the same problem every other java program has... its slow to start.

All these editors that I tried were also very feature rich. Overly feature rich, I simply didn't use most of the features, and the menubars were too full of things. I got lost. Not only this, but the feature-riches bloated the overall size of the executables. Some of them are 30Megs or more in size!

In parallel to this, I use an amazing source viewer at work called SourceInsight. SourceInsight is ABSOLUTELY the best code reading software on the market. This software is like a graphical cscope, but more robust and reliable. Unfortunately SourceInsight has a few major problems:

1. It's Windows Only - no ways around this... I'd have to run a virtual machine to use it
2. It's extremely expensive - something like $250 a license
3. It's not maintained anymore - features like code folding are not supported.
4. It's an MDI application, yet all editor windows are bound inside a master window... thus it doesn't let you take advantage of multiple monitors
5. I dont think it supports Objective-C

So I got to thinking... what if I created my own editor. If I created my own editor I could

1. add a source analyzer engine similar to cscope (like sourceinsight) for easy code jumping
2. make it small
3. make it run quickly
4. make it simple to use
5. make it support all the languages I care about (Objective-C isn't well supported in editors)
   

I've succeeded in items 2-5 (#1 is a doozy, its going to take a really long time to do that)

Beginning to Code (Enter the Scintilla!)

It is quickly apparent that writing a whole editor from scratch is a hugely difficult task. Luckily Scintilla handles all the editing tasks for me (folding/colourizing/etc). Unfortunately I found two problems with scintilla

1. Scintilla is a second class citizen on Mac
2. I dont like how Scintilla's folding

Regarding #1. Scintilla has been ported to MacOSX in two ways. A Carbon based port, and a Cocoa based port. I actually built a small editor (no frills like saving or anything... but you could type in it) in Carbon, and I found that programming in Carbon is rather disgusting. Its way overly complex and requires a huge learning curve. Add to carbons detriments the fact that programs written in it will never be 64 bit, and I abandoned this and moved to Cocoa.

Cocoa had it's own problems. The first is that at the time, it was only buildable via xCode (isn't moving away from xCode one of the major reasons Im making an editor?). There is a simple solution to this... learn about the xCode build process, and port the building of Cocoa-Scintilla to makefiles. This wasn't an easy task, but I got it done. I submitted my fixes into the official tree of scintilla, so I got a warm feeling for contributing back to the community; I also learned a lot about makefiles which has become useful for my dayjob. Cocoa's second problem is that it uses ATSUI (hehehe Dave are you reading this? Remember that the stuff I was looking at for DPS was ATSUI stuff?).

While ATSUI is great, its carbon based and will hold back porting to 64bit. The new Mac Text stuff is now CoreText. I haven't yet begun to port Scintilla to use CoreText, but its on my future TODO list (its important to simply get the editor working with what exists right now).

Regarding #2. I figured out the way Scintilla folds and did some kludging to make it work the way I want it to. I haven't proposed this code back to the scintilla because what I've written isn't production level code... its a dirty hack. I've released my patches for anyone to see if they are interested in how I am doing it. Sometime soon I plan on cleaning things up, doing it properly and proposing the code back to the Scintilla team.

Why Open Source?

Like I described with TextWrangler, if you run a Cathedral style project, you're bugs are your own. However with open sourced bazaar style, bugs belong to the community. As a single developer I simply dont have time to fully test my code (did I just admit that? did I just say I was a lazy programmer! yes indeed I did. If you've got a problem with that YOU CAN HELP ME OUT). I cant run through every usecase on every platform, but I CAN run through all the use cases I care about (I use CodeAssistor at work (windows port) and at home (mac port)... I'll find most of the normal use use-cases via regular usage... you'll note that I've left out linux port for regular usage HINT).

Using the bazaar style of project management, any bugs that I do not find via regular usage can be found by my users. As a bonus, my users are all programmers, so if they find bugs I think it more likely that they'll help me via patches since they can examine the code.

As a side note: This is why I chose Launchpad to host my source code. Launchpad makes "drive by contributions" much easier than sourceforge or google code. Go read up on it here.

Why BSD? Complex answer, I think BSD is more free than GPL. The BSD is truly free in that people can use the code to do nearly anything with the code (see my license). GPL restricts people from doing potentially interesting stuff with the code. To say that people wont submit code back to BSD where they would submit back to GPL is silly... if someone else has patches on top of my code they recently got SCREWED because I did some major refactoring; they'll now have to do a lot of work to maintain their patches... its easier and better for them to submit code to be incorporated into the trunk of the code.

Short Answer: GPL is way to legalize for me to truly comprehend it... best not to use licenses you don't really understand. BSD is simple and does what I want it to do.

What Have I Learned from Open Sourcing CodeAssistor?

The most important thing I've learned is that it doesn't really matter if you are open sourced or not via the standpoint of bugs until you can create a community. I've had nearly 550 downloads of version 0.0.5 and not a single bugreport (I found a major one while I was late into 0.0.6). "If you build it they will come" is not the way of open source... creating a community is something I'll have to work on, and it's going to be a difficult task.

As a plug, 0.0.6 is the most interesting time to jump on board the codeassistor community. Its now running rather well on the three major platforms, but there are lots of features still to do (the most interesting features at that!).

Another thing I've learned is that there are lots of shareware sites which will grab your stuff, claim it as "shareware" , and use it to promote their sites. Some of them technically they violate my license because they dont include my license demand #3 (see the licence). It's not worth it to hire a lawyer, and Im kind of thankful that they are trying to get the software into the hands of more people. Some of them like Softpedia were very nice in sending me an email and asking if it was ok to include the software, and making sure that my name is on the site as the author; in cases like this these sites are Win-Win.

Conclusion

I'm really looking for some contributors now. CodeAssistor is on the cusp of doing some really interesting stuff soon; CoreText implementation in Scintilla, cleaning & submitting the fold hack back to the Scintilla community, source code analysis engine. At +4000 lines (66,000 for scintilla), CodeAssistor is small enough to be quickly understandable, yet big enough to be complex and intellectually stimulating. It's a lead in towards Scintilla, winner of the Project of the Month for July from Sourceforge, and one of the truly inspirational open source libraries with an active community It uses three different languages (plain C, C++, and Objective-C), and runs on three major platforms, so it's an interesting learning opportunity towards cross-language cross-platform coding.

With help, I think that CodeAssistor can be a meaningful and widely used editor.

CodeAssistor v0.0.6 final release

Some minor tweaks to Linux (single instance app, icons in the menubar). Ready to Ship!

Source
Linux
Windows
Macintosh

CodeAssistor v0.0.6 in Beta

Quite a bit of (win/lin) refactoring done during my vacation in Alberta. The GTK/Linux menu is now ready, including accelerators. 0.0.6 is ready for Beta.

Get your Executables while they are hot!

Linux
Windows
Macintosh

GTK Nearly Finished

I've finished most of the functionality of the GTK/Linux port. Only thing left is the menu accelerators and polishing. Has all the features of Windows (nearly all the features of Mac... Mac has a nice "opened recently" thing that cocoa gives you for free), but accelerators (aka ctrl+s does not save) are not finished.

A rather major find bug was fixed in windows too. I highly suggest you get 0.0.6alpha if you are running 0.0.5-final/beta

Time to release the Alpha

Windows
Macintosh
Linux

GTK coming along

GTK is opening up the file, folding the code. I have an initial menu (although there are no items in the menu... its a start).

Im having a good time doing GTK programming. I love to learn new (and useful) APIs, and GTK programming is pretty straightforward.

On a not so fun note, I got a bad review on Fossforus :( a user didn't like it that CodeAssistor doesn't have tabs and therefore called the program "useless" . I have to defend my creation... CA is far from useless, I use it everyday at work, its folding capabilities and simplicity really help me. But yeah, tabs would be nice in the future. When you get, say, 7 or more editor windows, things start getting cluttered, and you start to realize that tabs would be nice.

More important than tabs are basic features that all text editors need (eg. search and replace).

That said, I am up to 430 downloads of 0.0.5 :) hopefully someone is finding the program useful.

Soon, very soon!

More Linux Work

Linux work is slowly progressing. the XC files have been set up for linux compilation and my ScintillaControllers are working on linux. I know very little about GTK so going will be slow until I am comfortable with the API.

One noteworthy thing... Version 0.0.5 just passed the 360 mark for total downloads from launchpad (this says nothing about how many downloads have occurred on all those shareware sites). Im scratching my head at how this happened. Last night there was a total of 91 downloads, and I am unaware of any "lists" that I would have been put on lately.

Im curious about who has downloaded CodeAssistor, and Im especially interested in bug reports. So if you are out there, you're reading this, and you use CA, send me an email or post a comment or file a bug-report :)

Here we come Linux

Some refactoring has been done, more refactoring will come as I learn more about GTK and see more stuff that I am doing wrong.

Thats said... basic (very very basic... ie it only opens a basic text editor) has been implemented on GTK for CodeAssistor.

I've tested the windows version under WINE and it works really well... but lets make a native app.

Linux here we come

CodeAssistor v0.0.5 final release

Found one bug from beta, fixed it, ready 2 go so lets shipit!

Grab the final version of 0.0.5

Change Notes
- Single Instance on Windows (already single instance on mac)
- Drag and Drop support
- Folding Fixes

MAC
WIN
SRC

Well that was easy

So I was able to get the drag'n'drop on windows complete in less than an hour. This is a really quick release timeframe so far, considering that these features are quite major.

Anyway, grab the beta and raise some bugs please
MAC
WIN