Auto Complete or Intelli Sense in Field's names typing

[YogiYang]

Hello,

After trying out LC for two days I feel that typing the names of controls/fields in the code is a pain as there is not auto complete/intelli sense feature.

Take for example the following line of code:

Code: Select all

set the text of field "DisplayMessage" to the text of field "EnterMessage"

Here DisplayMessage and EnterMessage are Fields and when we type them the editor does not offer to auto complete them. So when the project is of a big size or a stack that has lots of Fields on it, it becomes a pain to remember the exact names of each field and type it correctly.

For small projects while learning this is fine but otherwise lack of auto complete/intelli sense really kills productivity.

TIA

[bogs]

Heh, coming from languages like Realbasic, Delphi, and Vs 5/6, I feel your pain, however all is not lost.

There are plugins that specifically address this, I believe the GLX 2 editor is one of them that does what your looking for. There may be others as well, inside the IDE you should see on the menu bar a button that says "User Samples". This takes you to stacks you can download from rev's samples sites (shockingly faster from the IDE than from a browser).

You can also write scripts yourself to handle things like this, however initially at least that is an unrealistic expectation if you are new to the language/IDE.

[jacque]

Auto-complete will be in a future release, the LC team knows it's important. Patience.

[YogiYang]

Auto-complete will be in a future release, the LC team knows it's important. Patience.

Any idea as to how long?

[jacque]

I don't know how long it will take, but they've begun working on it.

[mrcoollion]

I am testing the GLX2 plugin but cannot get it to work.

It does show as a blue ribbon beneath the main LiveCode Menu and I am able to change the GLX2 preferences so the plugin is active but it has no effect in the LiveCode editor .

LiveCode version 8.1.5 (Indy) .

The view documentation url also does not seem to point to the correct URL.

Am I doing something wrong?

[bogs]

I believe mwieder is currently the maintainer of GLX2, he would probably be the guy to know

[bwmilby]

When you hover over the bar, it should indicate that either "Using LiveCode Script Editor" or "Using GLX2 Tools". Click on the "GLX2" on the right end of the bar to switch. It actually will switch out the default editor that is opened to edit scripts. The color changes as well. It goes from the color of the version (blue/green) to something else (black on what I'm using now).

[mrcoollion]

Thanks for the tip.

Got it working

[bogs]

Auto-complete will be in a future release, the LC team knows it's important. Patience.

Any idea as to how long?

Apparently, the future is now Oss paid version has it, and a bit more, $79.
From the pricing page:

[YogiYang]

Auto-complete will be in a future release, the LC team knows it's important. Patience.

Finally Auto-complete is added to LC's IDE but this is a very basic feature that all the languages and IDEs I have used till date have it. Why charge for such a core and basic feature that LC developers forgot to implement in their zest to add new unwanted features to LC?

I dropped the ideas of even trying out LC OSS or otherwise just because it does not have Auto-complete! It is not use wasting my time. Even open source general purpose IDEs like Eclipse give this Auto-complete feature for multiple programming languages that they support!

TIA

[Klaus]

Your decision!
But not the most clever one in my opinion.

[FourthWorld]

I dropped the ideas of even trying out LC OSS or otherwise just because it does not have Auto-complete! It is not use wasting my time. Even open source general purpose IDEs like Eclipse give this Auto-complete feature for multiple programming languages that they support!

In addition to the editor included in the install, you can edit LiveCode scripts in just about any external editor, such as Eclipse.

[bogs]

Finally Auto-complete is added to LC's IDE but this is a very basic feature that all the languages and IDEs I have used till date have it. Why charge for such a core and basic feature that LC developers forgot to implement in their zest to add new unwanted features to LC?

For the first part of the above, I would guess you just haven't used that many languages/IDEs, there are plenty that do not have autocomplete, or even any editor other than a plain text based one, but as I said before, it is a nice feature to have, just not a *must* have feature, and there are many ways to get it without paying a dime such as in various plugins, etc again, as I had mentioned previously.

For the second part, the charged version ($79. ) is not charging for that feature alone, there are 2 other features not available in the free Oss version, the ability to use all 3rd party extensions, and the ability to submit to the Apple app store (free apps). Both of those I would think contribute more to the price than autocomplete, again since you can achieve ac in so many other ways.

I dropped the ideas of even trying out LC OSS or otherwise just because it does not have Auto-complete! It is not use wasting my time. Even open source general purpose IDEs like Eclipse give this Auto-complete feature for multiple programming languages that they support!

As Klaus pointed out, that is up to you of course, I certainly don't intend to waste your time, your thread was just one of two where this subject had come up and various other people may be interested to know it.

HOWEVER, as Richard pointed out, many other editors can be used to edit Lc scripts, not just the one that Lc ships with or GLX2. Limit yourself, and you limit your future, if you expand your learning, you might find trade offs that are acceptable or not, but you'll expand your possibilities immensely.

[YogiYang]

In addition to the editor included in the install, you can edit LiveCode scripts in just about any external editor, such as Eclipse.

What about GUI?