Tips: June 2008 Archives

Note: All screen shots are thumbnails. Click to see them bigger.

Have you ever stared at two pieces of similar code, one that worked and one that didn't, and tried to sort out "what the heck is different"?   Or perhaps you are considering merging two functions into one. This is a differencing problem, but not of two versions of the same file.   Fortunately, Understand 2.0 provides two ways to help with this:

• Arbitrary Text Differencing - this provides two text buffers. Paste into each, do a diff.
• Entity Comparison - select two separate entities and compare them.

I'll show examples of each.

A frequently requested item for our 1.4 editor was the ability to select blocks.

2.0 has it – just use the “Alt” modifier when selecting. 

Here I select a block:

Ctrl-X, Ctrl-Y, and other selection commands work on block selections. For instance using “Ctrl  .”  I comment it out:

Other planned features are sorting and sending selections through internal editor macros or external text processing scripts. They aren’t far off, we just have to get done with some localization changes for international versions of Understand 2.0

Probably the most welcome improvement in this weeks B447 build is the release of significant improvements in our auto-completion facility in the Understand 2.0 editor.

The improvements are:

• It exists.
  It sort of did before but you had to hit ESC and it was just offering up a dumb lexical scan of the open file.
  
• It is fast.
  It quickly offers options as you type. If you find that irritating you can turn of the auto part in the Editor options dialog.
  
• It has key bindings. If you turn off automatic completion then get a completion offering via ESC and CTRL-SPACE.
  
• It is smarter. The completion list is based on the parse scope to that point plus what you have typed. It is aware of members and data fields (as appropriate to the language you are editing).
  
  
  
  

You, the user, as well as our own engineering staff have been asking for a good auto-completion for a long time. And with this release we feel it finally matches or exceeds the capabilities of some of the other popular IDEs.  It won’t stop here. We have plans to improve it in a variety of ways, including the use of code templates so you can tab between parameters and variables needed by the code brought in by the completion.

Your feedback and suggestions are welcome. support@scitools.com

We use SVN for configuration management here at Scitools. 

Here is a user tool import file that you can use to put SVN to work in your Understand 2.0 setup.  It assumes SVN is installed in c:\program files\ but you can use find/replace to substitute your path.

File Attachment: stitools.ini (10 KB) - User Tool Import File

After saving the file, import the tools via the Tools->Configure User Tools dialog.

You will then have right click menu “User Tools->SVN” on any right click of a file or entity that is within a file.