Edyuk

Releases

2009-07-20T10:14:32+00:00

As promised, here come new package release for both QCodeEdit and Edyuk .

I rushed a bit the Edyuk release because the 1.1.0 release is already quite old and I'd like to return to a "release early, release often" scheme if possible.

Enjoy!

Things to come

2009-07-18T20:49:22+00:00

Long time no news. I have been kept busy by school and exams lately. Hopefully both are now over and in the coming monthes I will have time available for hacking. Those of you who keep an eye on SVN may have noticed the increased activity already. Anyway I'll sum up my plans for the next few weeks to make sure that I am still alive and kicking.

Release QCodeEdit 2.2.3 : this will most probably be the latest release of that branch (except possibly for a couple of patches). It brings proper code snippets integrated into the lib better input binding infrastructure several syntax engine (hl, indent, fold...) improvements and a bunch of bugfixes.
Make a new Edyuk release (1.1.1 or 1.2.0 ?) : mainly bugfixes and update to latest QCE (so snippets as well) (to be honest I don't remember all the changes since the release of 1.1.0)
Work hard on the new branch of QCodeEdit (not yet on SVN) which, among other things will bring tremendous performance improvements, much improved line marks, improved syntax engine. Put a tech preview on the net as soon as possible and then move it to the trunk
Work hard on the pet project that may at some point turn into a new (much faster) syntax engine backend and possibly even completion backend (yeah, that another attempt to bring "genericity" to lexing/parsing/...)
Try to finish my board game project (Thud! for the connoisseur) : I'm not familiar with networked game architecture so that part is giving me some trouble, hopefully it's turn-based so I should be able to handle it someday.

And sleep, once in a while, of course... That's quite a lot of things to do so if you have some spare time and would like to get involved in a C++/Qt4 project feel free to contact me, any help will be extremely welcome.

Cheers

p.s : if you don't feel like to mess with the code you can still help by testing, submitting bugs or making suggestions.

p.p.s : this site could really do with a redisign but that's not something I'm good at so I'm reluctant to invest much time in the process as I know for sure I won't be satisfied with the result so help in that area would be most welcome as well.

QCodeEdit 2.2

2009-02-16T00:07:48+00:00

The long awaited 2.2 release of QCodeEdit is now available, at last.

The API has matured, the codebase has stabilized, the performance have improved, the docs have grown and many new features have been added. Here is a quick overview:

line endings management
encodings management
more formatting options
nicer panels
much improved code folding
input bindings to change the way an editor reacts to user input
dynamic line wrapping
code snippets (not in core lib yet : check the demo app)
several new language files

Go check it out .

In case you are interested in the docs, you can now view it online .

More work on Edyuk, specifically on the debugger, is coming.

Stay tuned.

Edyuk 1.1.0 out into the wild

2008-10-31T17:26:35+00:00

At last, after two monthes, and a couple of exhausting days Edyuk 1.1.0 is available for downloads.

Apart from what has been announced in the previous post there is a big feature addition : dynamic line wrapping. Lines are not yet wrapped at word boundaries but this should be available in the next version. Line wrapping can be toggled on/off using the F10 key (by default but this can be changed like every other shortcuts) and it takes a fraction of second to switch between the two modes, even on files with thousands of lines.

As always, Edyuk is available for downloads under various "flavors" :

Sources in .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 archives with UNIX line endings
Sources .zip and .rar archives with WINDOWS line endings
Windows installer
NEW : standalone zip archive with windows binaries AND all needed DLLs (Qt 4.4.3 + mingw runtime)

Hoping you'll like it.

Edyuk 1.1.0 codename "happily ever after"

2008-10-13T17:53:15+00:00

It's been more than a month since Edyuk 1.0.1 was released. Thanks to the feedback I have been able to polish many of the rough edges left, fix all the bugs that have been reported thus far and to add a couple of new features. Edyuk 1.1.0 is not ready yet but its time is coming soon. Despite my busy schedule I will probably be able to respect a two monthes release cycle once again.

The very purpose of this release is to reach the state where Edyuk is fully usable on a daily basis by any programmer. This means good usability and enough features but by no means perfect usability and every possible features. There may still be some small issues in it and there will always be room for new features but I'm quite satisfied of what I've done so far.

Here is a list of the new features and noticeable improvements in of existing ones :

it is possible to change the display mode of the "Manager" dock, as requested on Sf.net tracker (three possible choices : tabs, toolbox and combo box)
added UI form preview from the project manager (independent from Designer integration)
added a simple way to create subclasses of UI files from the project manager with easy selection of slots to create
qmake projects are now displayed by default using "flat" variables (no more HEADERS and SOURCES folders cluttering the tree) but you can change that if you prefer the old display mode
Proper line endings management has been added. Line endings are not preserved by default.
Added the "swap header|source" action to the "search" menu to make it visible.
Much improved class browsing by adding some line endings informations that allow more accurate jump from class tree to source files. uic-generated files are no updated properly even if they have been created after opening the project.
Reworked the build engine to allow much better build mode and exec target management. Advertised build modes are now ALWAYS valid. Build mode and exec target choices are preserved when switching from a project to another. More sensible choice for default exec targets.
Better coordination between build engine and debugging engine and more feedback to the user in case of troubles to improve the general debugging experience

And of course some bug fixes (not exhaustive) :

segfaults in GDB plugin when the selected debug target was considered as debuggable by GDB (but in assembly mode, not C++...)
the class tree was not properly updated when a file was deleted or removed from a project, which could result in segfaults when code completion made use of these symbols
auto save had some issues and was not very user friendly (can still be improved).
fileOpen() always returned a null pointer which in turn made it impossible to properly jump to a symbol when the file was not open yet

A couple of things left to do before Edyuk 1.1.0 may be released (all the above are available on SVN) :

Make it clear which project is active by using a bold (or any other formatting that will clarify things)
Make it possible to change the actve project using context menu (the combo box really isn't intuitive...)
Fix the "rebuild all" action for subdirs (more a workaround qmake/make limitations than a real fix but still...)

And of course I'm not anywhere near the end of it. There are loads of things left to do (or rather, things that could be interesting) :

a proper encodings support
add methods/members/... directly from the class browser
export the class tree of a project as UML
provide diff view when a "conflict" is detected (a file beingedited has changed on disk)
a better template system which would make use of QWizard to allow more complex things such as class creation
VCS management
support for other languages that have Qt bindings and generally speaking a wider set of syntax definition files
better user docs with tutorial, screenshots, ...
...

Some things are obviously more likely to get done in a near future than the others, especially considering ly busy schedule, so if any of these is important for you or if you just want to scratch a itch by working on it please feel free to do so and contribute some code. While I won't be able to do much actual coding I can find time to answer any questions you may have about Edyuk architecture, coding standards, etc...

First bugfix release

2008-08-28T11:31:08+00:00

After weeks of polishing and thanks to the incredible feedback of a few testers I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Edyuk 1.0.1, the first bugfix release of th 1.0 branch

It fixes all the issues reported on the trakcer so far and a couple others that had not been reported at all. A lot of usability improvements have been done, (many thanks to Thomas Keller and other testers), translations are back (French and Russian are almost complete, German and Spanish in progress) and couple of small but handy features have been added (or simply enabled in some cases).

One very important change (I know it's bad policy to make such deep changes in bugfix releases but it was needed) took place in data storage. With the release of Edyuk 1.0.0 there have been more and more packaging effort going on, as I previously mentioned, but the way Edyuk installed made things complicated. So I "centralized" data access : there are now multiple possible data pathes in which Edyuk can search plugins, syntax files, translations and other such files. Pathes can be dynamically added at run-time (no UI for this though). Edyuk can now be installed in several "layouts" :

the good old "sandbox" where everything reside in a single directory
"standard" *NIX install : executable in /usr/bin, libs in /usr/lib and data in /usr/share/edyuk
"bundle", for Mac bundles obviously (Thomas Keller is working on Mac bundling but nothing is ready yet)

This should make it easier to create distro packages. There's already a deb package available which makes use of this new layout. Careful with this one though. At the time of this writing it is still pre-1.0.1 material with a couple of issues left (including a potential segfault in code completion). No doubt it will be useful for the Gentoo ebuild as well and the Slackware package as well, and may help them getting into main repositories.

Edyuk is available for download in both TuxFamily and Sourceforge download servers.

Important note about windows binary installers : Compiled under Vista with MinGW 3.4.5 and Qt 4.4.0, the standalone version comes with all the needed dlls in case your system has different version of MinGW/Qt installed but it may need some more configuration effort (e.g. setting qmake full path, Qt include path, ...). The normal (not standalone) version requires MinGW and Qt to be in the PATH.

Enjoy and feed me back.

More polishing

2008-08-08T11:55:08+00:00

Edyuk 1.0.1 is getting closer.

Aside from translations updates there have been some improvements/fixes worth noting :

Edyuk no longer crashes when compiling/editing a project after it being modified by hand (in Edyuk or using another app)
Project settings dialog has been reworked and some missing features have been implemented
It is now possible to properly set breakpoints on file whose path contains whitespaces (as long as the path relative to the project root does not)
Call tips now works for constructors (with both heap and stack alloc syntax)
Plugin settings have been slightly reworked

For your viewing pleasure :

And yes, this is insired from Plasma's applet management dialog.

I'm going on holidays in Britanny for the next two weeks so don't expect much update until I get back.

Translations et all

2008-08-04T09:40:23+00:00

Turns out there's been a bit of a buzz around Edyuk lately. In two weeks Edyuk 1.0.0 has already been downloaded about 1100 times! And this does not take into account the various packages availables for several Linux distributions (not yet on main repositories bu still...) : Slackware , Gentoo . Even Ubuntu may get one soon (a launchpad project has been opened with some materials to generate debian packages).

The site was down yesterday because TuxFamily experienced troubles with its Load Balancer (the extra 150k hits on edyuk.org in the last two weeks may have contributed to it) but it's now back up and there are a couple of good news.

A patch release is on the wa. Edyuk 1.0.1 will feature a couple of bugfixes, more polishing. Mac support has already been improved a lot thanks to the help of Thomas Keller. There will also be a focus on translations. A lot of issues related to run-time translation have been fixed already. There will be at least two translations (french and russian) and more if some people step up to update the old ones (german and spanish) or contribute new ones.The translation files are available on the Subversion repository and can easily be downloaded through the web interface : http://edyuk.svn.sf.net/svnroot/edyuk/trunk/translations/

The vimacs plugin which has been announced in the previous post is however on hold as no contributor appeared on this side. It might be part of a feature release if I were to findmore time to read the manual of both Vim and Emacs and write the code myself (extremely unlikely as the things go...)

On Vimacs plugin and systray

2008-07-23T14:57:21+00:00

QCodeEdit feature request

Somebody submitted a support request on Sourceforge.net for "Emacs key bindings". While I've never used emacs and probably never will I understand that some people may be familiar with it and like the way it works. Hence my decision to make room for a flexible "binding system" in Edyuk.

Actually it is in QCodeEdit and I'll give more details about the internals on QCodeEdit site . To make it short it is based on a single class which provides a couple of basic input event handlers :

key press events
input method events
mouse events (move, press, release, double click)

These events are passed to the "input binding" by the editor, BEFORE the editor does anything. The input binding can take any action considered relevant according to the event and decide whether the editor should handle the event or not. A typical smart use for this would be to prevent the letter O from being typed . Another possiblity, probably a lot less fun would be to implement emacs-like, vi-like, anyOtherEditorThatRocks-like editing.

And that's where the Edyuk part of it steps in. Such bindings can be added on run-time and manually selected by the user but how does the program kows they are available? Plugins are the best answer by far. So I registered a new plugin type in EdyukApplication source code and created a new plugin that is now available on the Subversion repository :

the Vimacs plugin

Edyuk 1.0.0 is out

2008-07-20T20:58:18+00:00

The long awaited 1.0.0 release has finally come. Do not rush on Sourceforge however, from now on the packages will be hosted by TuxFamily : one more piece which moves away from Sourceforge for a number of reason (from ease of use to availability)so it is time to update your bookmarks.

Release highlights :

Much (much much much) improved graphical debugging : better breakpoints management, nicer call stack (aka backtrace), variables watches, watchpoints, registers view, memory view, disassembly, ... Even the most demanding should be satisfied by this complete rewrite of the debuger plugin
Improved completion (yet again) : it has very little (if anything) to envy to that of competitors, may they be open source or commercials : inheritance, templates, nested types, typedefs, loop variables, ...apart from macros very little can prevent it from delivering you the right answer. And it remains extremely fast compared to existing solutions.
Full support for Qt 4.4 (including the new help system, which is now used by Assistant integration)
Revamped plugin management. The UI is much cleaner and it is possible to prevent some components from being loaded to save memory and speed up loading
Polishing all over the place
Stability (at last ^^)

Hoping you'll like it.