wishes for code editor

A few more wishes/bugs/suggestions after a fun week of working with B4A:

- The auto-suggest dropdowns while typing are great, but currently they only show 10 items at once, and scrolling is tedious. Auto-sizing the dropdown for larger screens would be ideal, but even increasing the fixed height to 20 items would be good.

- After choosing a method from the auto-suggest dropdown, it would be handy if it auto-added the opening bracket. That would also keep the tooltip help in view as I continue coding.

- On a successful compile, could we add an option to auto-close the compile-results dialog? I keep having to close it manually - not a big deal, but would streamline things. Or even better, get rid of the dialog and just show the compile results in a bottom panel of the code editor.

- Would be handy if the compile dialog was tall enough to show a typical compile result without scrolling.

- Also on a successful compile, auto-bringing the emulator to front would be handy too.

- Would be handy to be able to comment/uncomment blocks of code using the context (right-click) menu.

- Would be very handy to have commands to indent/outdent blocks of code.

- Find - In most editors (and MS apps), F3 is Find Next, not Find. Would be handy (and more standard) to split up Ctrl-F and F3.

- When the Find dialog doesn't find any results, there is no feedback to show that the search happened. Perhaps just a beep and some message text in the dialog?

BTW, I've found the ability to select a word in the code and see all other instances of it highlighted is surprisingly useful. Thanks again!

Dave O said:

- On a successful compile, could we add an option to auto-close the compile-results dialog? I keep having to close it manually - not a big deal, but would streamline things. Or even better, get rid of the dialog and just show the compile results in a bottom panel of the code editor.

Click to expand...

Use Alt-3 to compile.

Dave O said:

- Would be handy to be able to comment/uncomment blocks of code using the context (right-click) menu.

Click to expand...

You can use the toolbar buttons for this.

Dave O said:

- Would be very handy to have commands to indent/outdent blocks of code.

Click to expand...

TAB and Shift-TAB

Hey Markus, thanks for those tips. I should have tried Tab and Shift-Tab before posting - that will save some time for me. Ideally, those would be in the menus too, to be more discoverable.

As screens have gotten bigger over time, I've found myself using toolbar buttons less and less, and using context menus (right-click) more, hence the wish above.

Will try Alt-3 for compiles and see how that works out.

Thanks again!

I'll also add one more: auto-complete is needed to work also with our own variables names.

It already should as long you have use Dim to declare them.

corwin42 said:

Use Alt-3 to compile.

Click to expand...

A dedicated button next to the Compile button on the toolbar would be better

Also:

-a toolbar button to open the folder the current program is in, I find I keep going back to the folder manually.
-When you mouseover a variable.method, only show the contents of the variable.method instead of the entire variable
-Let us copy variable data from the list of variables in debug mode
-If possible, when a program is paused, let us send variable data back to it
-When we close the program, have it tell the IDE to stop debug mode
-Instead of a single window interface, where different tool bars/blocks/windows take up parts of it, let us undock them from the main window, and dock them together like VB6 does. Or at least give us a second window to put them in

BTW, I've found the ability to select a word in the code and see all other instances of it highlighted is surprisingly useful. Thanks again!

Click to expand...

I'm also finding that handy, to the point where it annoys me VB6 doesn't do it.
Although, it annoys me that when I deselect the text or select something else, it loses all the placeholders.
Could we add a mode where it only searches/removes the placeholder when we toggle a toolbar button?
That way when the toolbar button is toggled, and you switch to a different code file, it can also search that one too