There were a couple of good points in there beyond the editor stuff
but now I would like to focus on chapter 15 Find the Perfect Tool
and its entry about the The Quest for the Perfect Editor.
Neal mentions several requirements he has for the
Perfect Editor and I'd like to see how Padre stands in
those issues or where we are going.
A macro recorder with easily changeable macro language
Padre currently does not have a macro recorder. As far as I know
Scintilla -
the editor framework I am using has some macro recording capabilities but
I have not played wit it yet.
What I already did is added an experimental feature (you need to turn it on manually
in the config.yml file) where you can run arbitrary perl code within Padre. This
can actually turn into a nice macro replaying tool. We can add a feature where users
can write short scripts in perl, save them in a special folder and then easily run them
in the editor using the menu. Basically it is quite similar to how the plug-in mechanism
works currently.
Launchable from the command line.
Well this is quite obvious for me and it is working. There are a number of improvements I want to make. I would
like to be able to open files that do not exists, effectively
creating an open buffer but with a filename already associated with it.
In addition I guess I would like to add some other command line switches.
Maybe we could add one to treat the directory as a project.
I am not sure how it would interfere with the other automatic project handling
we are planning.
Regular expression search and replace
Padre has this using the Perl
regular expressions but it is still restricted to the current file. I'd like to add
support to several other scopes such as All the files currently open,
All the files in the project, all the files in the directory with some
exceptions defined with wide-cards. I'd also like to be able to restrict the search
to the current functions and to the current block (or variable scope).
Additive cut and copy commands
to be able to collect some parts from one file
and then paste them to another file or another place in the same file. We don't have it yet.
I should understand how the clipboard works in WxWidgets.
Multiple registers
to keep the results of multiple copy operations.
Should be added too.
Cross-platform
Padre works on Linux and Windows and as far as I know
also on Mac. We have not tried it on HP-UX or Solaris or AIX yet but I hope
WxWidgets can work on those platforms and then will Padre too.
In the meantime a I have added some very naive
Parrot and Perl 6 support to Padre.
That is, it can provide basic syntax highlighting to PASM, PIR and Perl 6 files.
As the implementations are separated into modules we can work on them even while the
rest of the code is being refactored. I hope we can soon provide call-tips
and context sensitive help to both Perl 5 and Perl 6.
In the meantime, you can download and install Padre using CPAN.pm but as not
everything might work on the first try there are some installation instructions
on the download page of Padre
