The title already says most of what I'm after, but let me state some of the requirements explicitly:
The language is not widely used, so writing a new language tokenizer etc is assumed to probably be required.
Cross-platform, means at least Linux, Mac OS and Windows
Minimal features: Syntax highlighting and Code-completion (aka "IntelliSense")
Preferrable features: Interactive debugging
Assumption: The developer is not an expert in any one programming language (although mediocre in a few, and eager to learn new techniques), so the focus on an environment / tools that quickly gets a developer up to speed, and is productive enough to reach the goal as fast as possible.
Xtext would be the perfect fit for these requirements. All you need to do is to define your grammar and you have your parser, linker, editor, etc. Of course all of this can be customized to your needs.
If your language compiles down to Java, you also get expressions and debugging out of the box.
Lazarus + SynEdit + SynCompletion (cross platform + syntax highlighting + autocompletion), interactive debugging is way to difficult I guess.
Related
At work we are using a proprietary language and to program we are using Notepad++ with a simple code highlight. That is really annoying so, what I want to do is to invest some time to setup a text editor or an existing IDE to support my language.
I've googled a lot and there are so many options and before starting to work I wanna ask to you what is the best choice.
What I want to do is to have, like an IDE, a syntax highlight, a window with the function list tree, with the local function variables inside the same subtree, maybe text autocomplete (if I type "pro" I would like to see the suggestion "procedure" and if I press enter it will write for me something like
procedure "name" {
--code--
}
with the cursor on "name" ready to change it.
etc etc...
Can you suggest me the right path to follow?
Is it to keep using Notepad++? With sourcecookifier? functionlist?
Or I have to change to another text editor?
Or there is some famous IDE like Eclipse, NetBeans etc that allow to easily add my own language?
PS. my language is pretty simple, I don't have complex structures, is Pascal-like. Something like that:
variable int xyz
PROCEDURE asd
BEGIN
END PROCEDURE asd
I would recommend you to stay with Notepad++ and extend it with some plugins and configuration. This would be fairly quick and easy to set up and still give a big win, even though you might not be able to get all the nice features of something like Eclipse. But since you already know the Notepad++ it wouldn't require learning an entirely new tool.
Some plugins that I have found useful
Function List
Light Explorer
XBrackets Lite
There are probably a lot more that can be useful to you.
Notepad++ also got some built in auto-completion functionality that can be enabled in the settings.
Have you evaluated Eclipse XTEXT ?
What is Xtext?
Xtext is a framework for development of programming languages and domain specific languages.
The only IDE I have used for the last few years is Eclipse. There are lots of other IDEs available, also notable and popular is Netbeans. There are many others. It's important to note that all IDEs have their fans, but I can only speak to Eclipse.
Eclipse is a platform, which means it is an application on which you can build other applications. Eclipse provides a framework which you can customize and extend to produce a working application. It takes care of the user interface, preferences storage, modularisation using OSGi, and lots of other things.
Eclipse has facilities to support what you're looking for:
Syntax highlighting in the editor.
The Outline View provides function and variable listing in a tree
Autocompletion and Suggestions (activated by hitting ctrl-space)
Code Templates to fill out files and procedures etc.
The disadvantage is that customising and extending Eclipse to do what you want isn't trivial. Having written a language debugger for Eclipse, I can tell you that leveraging Eclipse's platform helped enormously, but there's a learning curve. You'd essentially have to be coming up with a new set of plugins to provide your highlighting, outlining, autocomplete suggestions and templates (I'm not sure if template support is built into the platform or not).
So I would say, unless you can find some sort of extensible editor for Eclipse - I know Aptana is extensible for tag-based markup - you are probably as well staying with your existing tooling.
Do explore the other IDEs though - I've heard good things about IDEA as well as Netbeans. :)
Good luck!
I can recommend SynWrite editor. Good support for external languages, fully customizable. (Editor of new lexers is there)
I love the old school editors because they enable users to absolutely fly through their code, editing almost as fast as they can think.
However, they suck balls at awareness of their environment, lacking robust implementations of features like Intellisense (pre-emptive strike: no, there really isn't an intellisense implementation in emacs that is trivial to install and doesn't suck) and common refactorings (pre-emptive strike #2: "global search and replace" does not a refactoring tool make). (i.e. It would be nice to be able to use nothing but vim to develop in .Net, but at the moment it is an ill-conceived undertaking at best).
I love Visual Studio/Eclipse/XCode because they are so integrated with their environments that I almost never need to look up API documentation, and can refactor fearlessly.
However, they suck balls at basic text manipulation and macros (relative to vi/emacs), are not available on all platforms (with exception of Eclipse), are likely either going to change nontrivially or perhaps just not be around in the next 10-20 years, and most importantly, are unable to run tetris.
Will we ever see the day when emacs or vi will be able to be as tightly integrated with .Net, Java and Objective-C projects as Visual Studio, Eclipse and XCode?
If not, is it because of proprietary concerns? (i.e. would require emacs to ship with a copy of the .Net framework)? Or is it just because at the moment our team doesn't have the manpower?
Why not load a Vi / Emacs emulator into Visual Studio / Eclipse and get the best of both worlds?
There are free versions of both for Visual Studio 2010 and above.
VsVim - Free
Emacs Emulator - Free
ViEmu - License Fee, works prior to VS 2010
Eclipse has some as well.
Vrapper
See eclim which provides Eclipse features for Emacs/Vim, so you can work in your favorite editor while having intelligent completion and other features supported by an Eclipse backend.
If we don't have the manpower to implement these features natively then the best we can do is to utilize the features implemented by others.
I think a significant part of the reason is technical and is due to Elisp: Elisp is very slow, and it lacks libraries. A good IDE requires a good parser, various auxiliary data-structures, and needs to be fast (e.g. parsing many files).
I know TextWrangler shows the option, but it doesn't actually do anything. So what I want is autocomplete, either with a key combination, or while I type.
Syntax coloring/highlighting is a requirement as well, though I know Xcode and TextWrangler have that.
You might want to use Lua Development Tools for this purpose. It has syntax coloring, plus it is doing smart autocomplete, depending on what your actual context is (required modules, ...)
It is an Eclipse Technology project, and it is Open Source! (EPL license).
Project web page - http://www.eclipse.org/koneki/ldt
Installation via Eclipse Marketplace - http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/lua-development-tools-koneki
I don't know if you have seen this page, but it seems a good place to start:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaEditorSupport
If I search for "completion" I get:
Decoda (Win)
LuaEdit (Win)
DForD (Win)
NsEditor (Win)
Visual Studio + LuaLite
Eclipse + LuaEclipse or LunarEclipse (java)
I personally use Vim + SuperTab (which only auto-fills with things that you have previously written).
There's a nice plugin for IntelliJ IDEA for Lua. IntelliJ IDEA is really nice, though kind of biggish.
Aside of that there is also TextAdept which is a lot smaller, and 100% configurable in Lua.
And probably a bunch of others.
If you want full (semantic) autocompletion, you should try lua-inspect (source code), which can be installed in the SciTE editor, and also into ViM using vim-lua-inspect.
It uses Metalua to fully parse the source code into AST and then performs code analysis. Apart from simple keyword-based syntax highlighters, it can:
differentiate between local/global variables, parameters and unused variables
jump to the definition of a variable/function
autocomplete table members
correctly rename variables/functions (not only definitions but also uses)
Even though it is not yet stable, and tends to hang on large scripts, it is very usable for standard Lua programs, mainly for it's intelligent autocompletion and renaming.
I use Eclipse mainly for LSL (linden Scripting language). The plug-in for this language does not provide things like templates or task-tag recognition. Is there any way that these kind of features in LSL-files (or any other generic file/code for that matter) can be used?
Take look at the XText project. If you can define the grammar of LSL there it will generate full Eclipse plugin for it, complete with syntax Highlighting, code Completion, validation and quick Fixes and more.
Another one to try (one i use myself) is LSL Editor
Full Syntax highlighting, code suggest, and even a off world run time environment. plus able to test multiple scripts by building test objects with prims.
Take a Look :)
LSLForge is being actively maintained, and has most of what you describe. If there's something missing, the developer is always looking for new challenges.
I am thinking of modifying an existing IDE (Ex : By developing a plugin) to provide support for a proprietary scripting language. I just need to implement few features like syntax highlighting, Autocompleting etc. (i.e the requirements are really simple). What would be the best IDE or Text editor to integrate the feature. As an example if I think to develop an eclipse plugin for that it would be a pain.
What do you think about Notepad ++?
You might want to give the NetBeans Generic Language Framework a try.
NetBeans project called Generic Languages Framework allows you to define a programming language and integrate it to NetBeans IDE. In the first step you should describe the language - lexical part (define tokens using regular expressions) and syntax (grammar rules). In the second step you can define how to visualize this language in NetBeans. You can define colors for tokens (syntax coloring) or folding (based on grammar rules). You can define what parts of this language should be displayed in the navigator, and how to indent this language plus many other features.
This tutorial should guide you through the process of creating new NetBeans module, adding languages support into it, describing lexical and syntax structure of your language and adding support for all standard editor # features for your language.
Notepad++ allows you to define custom syntax highlight files in a very easy way, but it's not a very good solution for auto-completion (look at this SO question).
If you want a real IDE to extend, I suggest you to use Eclipse.
Update: Tutorial on how to develop an Eclipse plugin.
In vim you can easily add your custom syntax highlighting rules by adding another file in the syntax folder; for the details it is best to look at the help.
If I remember correctly notepad++ also allows defining custom syntax files.