Extensions Script Editing

[Mikey]

Can we have a preference to use something else (like textWrangler) as the text editor for the scripts, or is there a plan to have the LC script editor be the editor of the future for extensions and widgets?

[benjibeaumont]

Hi Mike,

The mac users in the office are using TextWrangler for editing. One of our engineers (Ali) wrote a coloriser for it which can be found in the git repo here:

https://github.com/runrev/livecode/blob ... lder.plist

If you put that in language modules directly in text wrangler you'll get a pretty lice LiveCode Builder editing experience. The editing plugin targets the source file when testing/building packages so all you have to do is click save in TextWrangler and then hit the test button in the widget plugin and it'll run your plugin in the IDE. Pretty neat.

Regards,

Ben

[Mikey]

When you click "edit script", though, you get textEdit. I'd like to launch textWrangler. I guess that should be a bug report. Going there now...

[benjibeaumont]

Hi Mikey,

Good suggestion. I think it opens the default text editor for the system at the moment. So if you set text wrangler as your default for .mlc files it should work.

Warm regards,

Ben

[Mikey]

So for anyone else who is new to this, here's what you do to import the syntax colorization file to textWrangler:

1) in your browser, retrieve https://github.com/runrev/livecode/blob ... lder.plist FOR ME, I had to right-click on the link and do a "Save Link As...", otherwise I was taken to GitHub and got to stare at the code.
2) mv ~/Downloads/LiveCodeBuilder.plist ~/Library/"Application Support"/TextWrangler/"Language Modules"/


Now when you open a widget or library in textWrangler, it will be colorized. If you don't know squat about gitHub, I'd also create an account and ask to be notified when the file is updated.

[FourthWorld]

External editors are a good workaround for now, but I'm assuming we'll be able to edit Builder scripts in the IDE before release, yes?

[benjibeaumont]

Hi Richard,

We'll integrate LiveCode Building scripting into the IDE at some point in the future, but for now we'll continue to rely on external editors. It's an early technology that will continue evolving for some time. We'll be improving the plugin to make the development experience smoother in the short term.

Warm regards,

Ben

[jacque]

The plist works in BBEdit too.

[Mikey]

I'm going with you already knew that TextWrangler is just the free version of BBE.

[jacque]

Yup, but thought I'd mention it just in case. Swami N. had most of a working plist for BBEdit but got stuck in a couple of places, I'm going to drop him a note about this.

[peter-b]

For those of you who use Emacs, the next release will include an Emacs mode for LiveCode Builder programs.

Only syntax highlighting so far.