I'm learning to use a new hosted e-commerce system at work which uses a proprietary markup/scripting language for its page templates. They are similar to JSP pages (although the server tags don't have a prefix, i.e. there is no "xsp:") and use ${expressions} similar to Expression Language. We are transitioning from a .Net system, so all of my fellow devs are very used to having thorough IntelliSense available in our editors.
So, my question is whether it is possible to make these custom tags available in content assist, and whether it is worth the hassle if there is any. (I'm aware the latter is subjective - I'm a reasonable guy and open to opinions.)
FYI, I'm more concerned with auto-completion of tags, but expressions would be great as well depending on how much work is involved. We are using eclipse for Java EE, Juno (core IDE v4.2.1) with WTP... Sorry I'm not really sure how or what to share as far as versions and components go! Let me know if any additional info would help.
Thanks in advance.
A decidedly non-hassle-free answer would be to create an Eclipse plug-in to support your proprietary template language. One place to start might be Veloeclipse, a HTML/XML/JSP/Velocity Editor for Eclipse, which claims to have the following features which you may find interesting:
Smart indentation of velocity directives (on pressing return or when using tabs)
Code folding
Code Formatting
Smart indentation of html tags (on pressing return or when using tabs)
Syntax highlighting for both html and velocity
Autocompletion and Content assist for tags, directives and references (Ctrl + space in html attribute values or when opening or closing tags)
Sources here: http://code.google.com/p/veloeclipse/source/checkout
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
Emacs and vi are the traditional editors of the programming gurus. But, have any modern editors been able to displace these two in terms of extensibility and text editing productivity?
I know editors such as Eclipse and commercial editors provide language specific advantages such as intellisense and refactoring, though this is not quite what I'm looking for. My question is more along the lines of an innovative editor paradigm at a more general level, such that I can use it for many disparate languages, extend it for other tasks, etc.
Sublime Text is a relatively new and very good editor for Windows.
www.sublimetext.com
a more general level, such that I can use it for many disparate languages, extend it for other tasks
On Windows, the Zeus editor can be configured for almost any language and is also fully scriptable making it easy to extend.
How about Yi? My impression that its community is currently targeting the Haskell hacker, but is supposed to be like Emacs but based in Haskell rather than Emacs Lisp. Not quite mainstream, but is the kind of editor you're inquiring about I think.
I'm really surprised no on has mentioned these two yet:
TextMate (Mac)
E Text Editor (Windows) (it recently gained vim features, but I wouldn't call it innovative).
Actually most functionality of both editors can be replicated in vim, and I'm sure in emacs, too.
My question is more along the lines of
an innovative editor paradigm at a
more general level, such that I can
use it for many disparate languages,
extend it for other tasks, etc.
The web browser is or will be the ultimate editing tool that can be extended, customized, that is always connected and have all kinds of applications... Pretty much everything can be done through a Web Browser.
As Jeff Atwood said, Firefox is an IDE. With it, and some extensions, you can transform Firefox into the Visual Studio of browsers.
Any web page is an extension of this new kind of "editor". That's why, for example, Google uses it as the main component of an OS (like Chrome OS). The current trend is to do everything on the web.
Eclipse, Visual Studio and friends are IDEs. Emacs and Vi are text editors. A text editor makes just one component of an IDE. Editors that come with most modern IDEs provide an Emacs or Vi mode. (Here is an example). The other way round, Emacs and Vi could be easily extended into a full IDE. (For instance, look at JDEE).
Wikipedia's comparison of text editors.
I've tried UltraEdit, Notepad++, Komodo and a bunch of others and for my money Editplus is the best of the bunch but it's really a matter of personal taste - what annoys you, what features do you enjoy, etc..
I think that the answer to your question would be JEdit, UltraEdit, KomodoEdit, Geany, TextMate, NotePad++, Kate, Gedit. I've used some of them at some point before I finally chose to stay with Emacs for all eternity. All those editors except TextMate and UltraEdit are open source and I personally enjoyed a lot KomodoEdit for web development. It also had an nice extension API based on XUL and JavaScript.
The general advantage of this batch of "modern" editors it that they have better support for modern GUI toolkits and better builtin "intellisense" features. None of them, however, is as customizable or as extendable as Emacs and Vim. You won't be able to do terminal text editing with these editors either.
As an example of what you can do with emacs, I just figured out that you can run the git mode magit transparently over ssh and thus interact with a remote repository! Way cool! I have yet to found another editor with that kind of extensibility.
I usually stick to emacs, even though (quite obviously for most people) i cant use it to its full potential. Past week i had to work on a pc with notepad++ installed, so i tried it and liked it very much. It feels "comfortable", i think, still it cant beat the "raw power" of the classics.
What's the best solution for authoring HTML5 in Emacs? Is there a mode that will do conformance checking?
My best suggestion is to use nxml-mode (available as packages in several linux distributions if you're on that platform) and load the html5 RelaxNG compact format specifications from HTML5 specification page (or any other source if you have one).
Nxml-mode validates xml files on the fly according to relaxNG specifications and give you nice customization features and handy functions for writing documents faster like inserting end-tags and such. Written by James Clark, so you know the author knows his XML.
If you load it like a system package you can probably just add it to your auto-mode-alist and be good to go. I have just set the following two variables for auto-completion and more docs is available at the first link.
(nxml-bind-meta-tab-to-complete-flag t)
(nxml-slash-auto-complete-flag t)
When it is loaded, just load the file you want and specify the location of the schema for html5, save its location through the menu and you should be on your way. There are also more links to documentation on nxml-mode in the link I provided.
I've just seen this project, which apparently takes care of the necessary work to teach nxml-mode about HTML5:
http://github.com/hober/html5-el/tree/master
An easier to install solution may be web-mode. It definitely plays well with HTML5 and doesn't require you to jump through the XHTML hoops.
JavaScript and CSS blocks work as you would hope.
It also includes the ability to handle common templating languages like php, erb, handlebars, etc.
Check out http://web-mode.org for more details. It's available as a package, at least on MELPA.
I had nXML previously but found the schemas quite cumbersome to install, meaning I didn't get it to work with HTML5. I now use web-mode. Drawback is that there is no real-time validation. But that's cool as there are online-tools for that.
I recommend emmet mode. https://emmet.io/download/
This mode can be enabled in other editors rather than Emacs.
I have some big documentation to do that will contain pieces of code I'd like to give the conventional "coding language" syntax highlighting. I've searched the styles feature to do such a thing, but there is no way to do that (in fact I could only found a forum where people were fighting about adding this feature or not, but this is not the point).
There is an abandoned extension for OpenOffice, but using it freezes my installation of OpenOffice.
What's the easiest way to do this? Should I try to recompile the extension and debug it (although I'm already having a hard time compiling another Java project), or maybe I should use a macro? How to implement this?
One possibility is to use one of the many code to html tools out there and then include the html in your OpenOffice document (using "File..." on the Insert menu).
One possibility is highlight. Vim has a :TOhtml command that will convert the current file to syntax highlighted html using the current colour scheme. I've not tried it, but this looks promising. There are also a few online ones, such as this. I'm sure there are a great many other options.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
As a developer I really don't like writing documentation but when I have to I'd like to make the process as painless as possible.
The problem with Word is that it constantly gets in my way. I worry more about the layout than about the actual content ... that's why I'd like to get rid of Word.
Ideally I'd like to write my content and then 'compile' it into a document.
I've heard of LaTeX but I don't have any experience with it whatsoever. Would this be the right technology for the job? What editor (Windows) should I use? Is it a good idea to start with LyX?
EDIT: I'm not asking about documenting code (I use Sandcastle for that).
Update 2014:
We have now switched to GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown).
It's really easy to work with.
Write code & documentation in the same IDE!
Everything can be versioned!
Get great output either as raw txt, html or pdf!
My solution to this was to invest some time in creating a decent Word Template for myself.
The important thing to do is make sure you have a Style defined for everything you can put in the document.
Once you have all the Styles defined and all of the document content tagged with the correct Style instead of formatted in an ad hoc fashion, you'll be surprised how easy it is to produce good looking Word documents quickly every time.
The wider problem here is that everyone spends hours in Word and yet it is very rare for companies to invest in Word training. At some point you have to bite the bullet and take the time to teach yourself how to use it properly, just like you would with any other tool.
Anything you can do with LyX you can do with LaTeX. LaTeX is suitable for all sorts of things; it has been used for everything from manuals to lecture slides to novels.
I think LaTeX is probably worth looking into as an option; if you've ever wanted to "code" for your word processor, LaTeX is for you. At the simplest level you can define new commands to do things for you, but there's a lot of power there. And the output looks really neat.
In my opinion, LyX is fantastic in certain circumstances, handy in others, and occasionally just gets in your way. I think it should be seen as a productivity booster for LaTeX. In other words, learn to use LaTeX before trying LyX. Both are of course free and available for Windows, though the learning curve is quite steep compared with MS Word. For long documents, or plenty of similar documents, LaTeX/LyX is probably a worthwhile investment.
I've found that wikis can be good for this. Find a wiki you like that lets you do a bit of formatting, but nothing really heavy. Ideally it should let you format code easily too - to be honest, the markdown available on SO is probably a good start.
That way:
You have change tracking built-in (assuming a decent wiki)
You can edit from anywhere
Everyone always sees the same documentation (instant distribution)
You can concentrate on content instead of formatting
You could write your documentation using your own XML format and then transform it into any format with XSL (e.g. PDF via FOP+XSL-FO ).
See also the DocBook XML format.
LaTeX is an extremely powerful tool and might well be overkill here as it is designed for scientific/mathematical literature. It has a (relatively) steep learning curve and can be tricky to coax to do exactly as you want if you're new to it. I LOVE LaTeX, but it is not really a general purpose word processor.
Have you considered OpenOffice instead?
LaTeX is really a very powerful language if you need to write documents.
Perhaps you can try texmaker, a cross-platform LaTeX editor:
Texmaker is a clean, highly
configurable LaTeX editor with good
hot key support and extensive Latex
documentation. Texmaker integrates
many tools needed to develop
documents with LaTeX, in just one
application. It has some nice
features such as syntax highlighting,
insertion of 370 mathematical symbols
with only one click, and "structure
view" of the document for easier
navigation.
What about using HTML? This way you could then publish the documentation if there will be need for many people to access it from many places.
Despite all efforts and reasonable expectation I don't think Word Processing has been "solved" yet.
My response to what I also personally find a deeply frustrating experience with MS Word is to avoid it altogether and use an auto-documenting tool like GhostDoc to generate XML from what I've already written in the code (DRY!) and deal with the XML from an XSLT based intranet site or similar later.
Are you talking about documenting your actual code? If so, I recommend Doxygen for unmanaged code and Sandcastle for managed code. Both will compile your help or build it as a website for you.
Both applications will read special tags above functions / classes / variables and compile that into the help.
Well I've never found anything wrong with MS-Word in the first place. (i.e if you take the time to know how to use it effectively). OpenOffice indeed is an amazing & credible free alternative - but then if you hate MS Word for layout related problems, the same problem is gonna occur with OpenOffice too.
Never tried the Latex system myself, but have heard its good for scientific work. I think using some HTML WYSIWYG editor would be best for you, if you want to just focus on the content.
I considered a wiki, but I decided to go with a modified Markdown notation, for the simple reason, that a wiki's content isn't easily exported and distributed outside of the wiki itself, while the Markdown can be rendered into HTML.
Answer to chris' question about my workflow: I write the documentation with a Notepad-like application (TextWrangler, only because of its word-wrapping feature) in its raw Markdown format. Then I have a small localhost documentation website with my modified Markdown parser (extended for a few features and a bit more HTML-oriented functionality) that checks for the timestamps for the documentation files - if a file has been updated, it parses that file into HTML, and stores the file in a cache.
This way I'm able to edit the source documentation on my desktop, and just press F5 in my browser to see the results immediately.
I haven't got around to trying it yet, but I've always thought AsciiDoc would be good for this kind of thing.
If you want something simpler than LaTeX, you can have a look at ReStructured Text
Read this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pragmatic_Programmer . There is some idee fixe inside, so that documentation should be built automatically. Think about using your IDE for this, or look for some additional tools. Most modern languages support generating documentation as you write the code. This can simply maintain your doc in touch with latest changes in the code.
I prefer to use a RTF editor which is a lot less clunkier than words. This way the formatting and all the headers/footers nonsense will not take up half your time. Wordpad has worked for me on several occasions. I'm stuck with Word for now though :(
there are a lot of possible ways:
embedded documentation, e.g. javadoc: good for describing APIs, not so good for the "big picture"
plain html: can be checked in under version control, a definite plus
a wiki, e.g. confluence -- great for collaboration, but has version control different from your source
LaTeX or somesuch: better suited for books or papers than typical documentation; support for graphics is cumbersome
an Office clone, e.g. OpenOffice: mostly the same as Word+Visio, but open source, with a nicer document format
I usually document the software structure (the "metaphors" of a project, component interrelations, external systems) up front, using Visio, in "freeform" UML. These are then embedded in confluence, which can be converted to PDF if someone wants a printout.
LyX
LyX is a WYSIWYM front end to LaTeX: You get the convenience of a document processor (somewhat similar to Word) with the consistency and power of LaTeX: It doesn't get in your way and can do a lot of things that professional writers need.
Note: The correct answer for you really depends on your way of thinking --- we can't decide this for you. This answer simply shows an excellent choice if you think of documentations as documents and want something similar to Word (where Word is good) that doesn't suck as Word (where Word is bad for programmers).
But many programmers think of documentation differently and hence prefer different metaphors. I myself had the same problem years ago, worked with LaTeX (as I am a mathematician), found LyX and finally settled on a Wiki/Source system that I wrote myself.
Vim is the solution for anything that means writing plain text in the most efficient possible way. If you need formatting, then use XML, Latex or something similar (in Vim).
Vim changed my life!
Simple answer: LaTeX sounds like just what you are looking for.
I use it for writing documentation myself. I will never go back to Word if I have the option.
At phc, we started with latex, then moved to docbook, and have settled (permanently I hope) on Restructured Text/Sphinx.
Latex was chosen because we are academics, and latex is the tool of choice. I believe it didn't generate good enough HTML.
Docbook was chosen for power, but it was very unwieldy. It put us off writing any documentation: code had to be manually formatted, we kept forgetting the syntax, and it was difficult to read. The learning curve was also steep.
Finally, we moved to reST, using sphinx, and that was a great decision. Documentation is now very easy to write, and both PDF and HTML versions look beautiful (though the PDF could do with some customization). Its very easy to customize too.
The best bit about reST though, is that its human readable in source form. That is a wonderful advantage. I've switched to using reST for all my stuff now, especially anything over the web (except of course academic papers, where one would be foolish to use anything but latex).
You may want to look into doxygen at http://www.doxygen.nl/, see their nice examples. In this case, the documentation is presented by tags in comments in the source.
Another option would be to use an online system like trac from http://trac.edgewall.org/ which is a wiki/doc/issuetracking system that lives on top of subversion.