Not sure if the developer has ever considered this, but how about adding in Syntax Hints, just like in a real IDE ? Like when you start typing in some code you can press a hotkey to bring up a list of what text it thinks you are trying to type, similar to autocomplete, and then once a valid command is typed and the cursur is in the word somewhere, you can press another hotkey to have some sort of tooltip pop up that displays all the valid syntax options for that command. And perhaps another hotkey that would actually paste in all the valid syntax options into the code, so you can freely edit it to your hearts content. What do you guys think about this?

Jake

I also miss this from an IDE like Visual Studio. To me this is more useful than the current autocomplete.

It's a nice idea in principle, but of little obvious value in practice. Plus, surely it's rather hard to implement in a general-purpose editor? Either it would have to be hardcoded into UltraEdit, like it is in most IDEs, or it would require a pretty complicated scripting language to define the syntax of each language used.

If the former, it would only be able to support the handful of languages that it was implemented for. It's easy for Visual Studio - support VB, C++, and C#, and you're done. But people use UltraEdit for all sorts of languages. I use it to code in OCaml; I wouldn't be particularly pleased if Ian spent months working on a feature that would only help VB programmers!

If the latter, it would take a lot of effort to make it possible for people to create information like this for arbitrary languages. Emacs can do it -- but only by containing a full Lisp interpreter! Do you really want to learn a new programming language, and spend weeks hacking away in it, just to save yourself a few seconds looking something up every once in a while?

Haeleth! This was an excellent summary of why we might rather miss such a feature than actually have it.

I totally agree.


Manni

Haeleth's post shows some of the decisions that IDM must make when they determine what new features to add. They can't please everyone. I personally would like to see UE add scripting support and this sort of thing would work well through scripting. I actually would like scripting support more than this IDE feature. It's what I miss most from Nedit (linux only). Currently to implement scripts I have to use tools, but only 10 are allowed. 20 if you use a project. Previously I've asked IDM to add support for more tools and hopefully they will do so.

Haeleth wrote:It's a nice idea in principle, but of little obvious value in practice. Plus, surely it's rather hard to implement in a general-purpose editor? Either it would have to be hardcoded into UltraEdit, like it is in most IDEs, or it would require a pretty complicated scripting language to define the syntax of each language used.

Nice idea but little obvious value in practice??? What? Um okay you are coding for some project and you need to know what the syntax is for a certain function you are typing in. What do you do? You go and look in the documentation for it.... OR you just hit a freaking hotkey and it tells you what the proper syntax is. Hello?? Is that obvious enough value for you? I can't think that any real programmers out there would not think this would be a great benefit.

And regarding implementation, it certainly does not have to be hard coded at all into Ultraedit. It can use some sort of text file just like the WORDFILE does for syntax highlighting. Check it out:

The user is doing some coding. He types in some function command like...

functionName

and then he wonders "hmm now what was the proper flag syntax for this?" Then all he does is hit the hotkey. Ultraedit checks out the external text doc that contains the syntax definitions and it parses through it until it finds the right command "functionName". Ultraedit sees the syntax for it in this file. So it takes that syntax and creates a tooltip popup that says this:

functionName -option1 string -option2 string -option3 int

and the user says "oh yeah! I want to use option 2!" So he continues typing out his function and the proper option he needed....

Syntax hints are a totally helpful thing. And I wouldn't worry about the support side of this. Yes there are a million different programming languages out there. I primarily mess with MEL and HSL (no one here probably even knows what those are) for my profression in 3d graphics and motion capture. I certainly would not expect the Ultraedit developers to determine what all the proper code syntax is for MEL or HSL and then add that. That is something I can do on my own if I want to. And I would certainly take the time to do it too, because it would save SO much time in the long run.

You see, all the Ultraedit dev's need to do is make this idea work similar to the Syntax Highlighting. The syntax code is not hard coded at all. It just works off of some external text document that anyone can add to and remove whatever they want. This keeps the developer's support for this to a minimum...

Is this more clear why this is a good idea now?

Jakobud wrote:You see, all the Ultraedit dev's need to do is make this idea work similar to the Syntax Highlighting.
...
Is this more clear why this is a good idea now?

Well, you convinced _me_. UEdit already has CTags integration that I use extensively for my C/C++/Perl programming. For C and C++ ctags stores the function arguments in its list of tags. So, indeed, carrying this one step further wouldn't be that hard.


Manni

Where might one find a nice help file for C or C++ that one could use with Uedit for function semantics or description as described above?