Feature Requests

J_A_Whye · February 23, 2011, 12:09am

What I’d really like to see is an “always available” project where I can just try something without actually creating a new project.

Say, a project called Try It Out or something like that, that has build.settings, config.lua, and main.lua already loaded. Plus, whatever library files I use the most.

Whenever I launch CPM those files are created from scratch, so all I have to do to try something is open the main.lua and type or paste in the code.

If I decide I want to turn that temporary project into something more permanent, I can rename it and it stays put. Otherwise, when I quit CPM that “scratch pad” project goes away and gets regenerated the next time I launch CPM.

That’s what I’d like to see in one of the next versions of Corona Project Manager.

Jay
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infusedreams · February 23, 2011, 1:13pm

A relaunch simulator button, as opposed to stopping and restarting

(when using external editor) [import]uid: 6981 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 24731[/import]

cl-apps · February 23, 2011, 1:30pm

Some constancy with anti aliasing would be nice in tab view. All over the place at the minute. [import]uid: 33866 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 24738[/import]

J_A_Whye · February 23, 2011, 1:47pm

@infuseddreams - That should come in the next release of Corona SDK. They are making a way to communicate “open project xyz” to the simulator without going through the command line like I have to now.

@cl-apps - can you clarify exactly what you mean? Because I’m not doing anything with anti-aliasing as it is, so I’m not sure how it changes from one part of CPM to the other.

Thanks!

Jay
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FrankS · February 23, 2011, 2:07pm

Luadoc integration.

Auto-generate updated webpages with documentation with luadoc.

Button would bring up the browser with latest and greatest local doc pages for project.

-Frank.

PS. I’m not really impressed with luadoc compared to the similar facilities found with other language environments, but so far it’s the best I’ve found… and better than nothing.

-FS. [import]uid: 8093 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 24749[/import]

cl-apps · February 23, 2011, 2:12pm

When ‘open in window’ is set in prefs the text is anti-aliased.

When ‘open in tab’ is set in prefs the text is anti-aliased sometimes and then randomly changes to not anti-aliased.

The preview tab generally has non anti-aliased text. - prefer to be anti-aliased.

For your information I’m using Menlo 12pt as my coding font.

Also… can we have background window colouring too as I quite like that feature of TextMate. At the minute I’m set to Twilight.

Its boring stuff like this that makes for a restful environment to code in… for me at least.

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J_A_Whye · February 23, 2011, 4:24pm

@cl-apps - Thanks for the clarification. The main window and the editor windows do have differences (boring stuff that’s due to the dev environment I’m using) so that’s probably what’s going on. Although the fact that the tabs change depending on the phase of the moon is weird. I’ll look into that.

@FrankS - I’ve never used luadoc but will look into that. At some point I’ll put in printing support and when I do that I’ll also look at other options for exporting projects/code.

Thanks.

Jay
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FrankS · February 23, 2011, 9:15pm

Allow one to easily open-up a terminal session in the directory of the file you’re editing - maybe thru an terminal-icon in the bar.
You probably could cater for many of those request by giving us the ability to kick-off shell scripts while you populate the environment with the relevant state variable, like file, directory, selection-string, word/symbol under cursor, etc. - very much like TextMate, but one-way would be a great first step.

This would allow you to open that terminal session, generate luadocs, get to the API documentation webpages for a word/selection, etc.

Having that list of configurable shell scripts popping up under your right button…

(Just trying to keep Jay busy - or actually to make his life easier

-Frank.

PS. In the beginning I was very skeptical about this CPM tool - I paid for it to support the effort and to see where it would go - but it’s getting better and better, and it has become my tool for configuration management and for module reuse, and almost makes me give up my TextMate - excellent!

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lano78 · February 24, 2011, 3:52am

Be able to re-arrange tabs.
Save opened tabs upon shutdown and load those tabs when starting CPM again.
Different tabs within different projects, CPM remembers what tabs you had open in this and that project.

Nice work with CPM, I am very happy with it. [import]uid: 13560 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 24898[/import]

J_A_Whye · February 25, 2011, 5:23pm

Be able to re-arrange tabs.

This one could be hard because I’m using a tab control someone else wrote – not sure if there’s a way to do it easily or if it will require a lot of recoding. But it would be nice.

Save opened tabs upon shutdown and load those tabs when starting CPM again.

Oh yeah, this one makes a lot of sense and I’ll try to have it in the next update with features (as opposed to updates that just fix bugs).

Different tabs within different projects, CPM remembers what tabs you had open in this and that project.

This is the only one I have a real problem with, from a user experience standpoint. I often find myself with tabs open in one project, going to another project to see how I did something or to grab a chunk of code, and I wouldn’t want a bunch of tabs opening just because I went to another project.

On the surface it seems like a cool idea – whether I can make it workable or not (without people swearing at it) remains to be seen.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Jay
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Runseld · February 26, 2011, 5:54am

Variable name auto completion (similar to BBedit) [import]uid: 7664 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 25261[/import]

Piotr_Blerdo.com · February 28, 2011, 9:32am

A way to quickly change simulator device. It could be shortcut or dropdown list on the icons bar. I very often switch between iPhone/iPhone4 to test and now its a little tedious job. [import]uid: 22837 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 25525[/import]

J_A_Whye · February 28, 2011, 4:22pm

Variable name auto completion (similar to BBedit)
Yeah, I really want that, too. But to do that I need to parse the entire source document to figure out what’s what – which sounds really hard to me. Not sure exactly what would be needed since I’ve never done anything like that before, but I will look into it.

A way to quickly change simulator device.
Yep, it’s kind of a pain right now to check on different devices, I ran into that last night. What I ended up doing was launching via CPM and then switching devices via the View As option under the Simulator’s Window menu.

But I’ll look for an “easy from CPM” way to launch as something other than the default device.

Thanks, you guys.

Jay
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Runseld · February 28, 2011, 5:02pm

Variable name completion
One way I would implement variable names autocomplete would be to add everything typed, with the exception of strings or numerals to a file specific auto complete. In essence recording every word not wrapped in quotes or non alpha to the autocomplete. It could perform a quick parsing eveytime the file was opened.

I wouldn’t try to manage an exhaustive expression parser, and I think the average user would not notice if the commented text was added autocomplete.

Thanks for the quick response, CPM is quickly becoming my primary editor. Thanks for the hard work! [import]uid: 7664 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 25578[/import]

J_A_Whye · March 1, 2011, 1:40pm

@Runseld - thanks for the suggestion, I’ll poke around at that when I get ready to look into autocomplete again. I love hacks like that – 95% of the functionality people want with much less coding.

Jay
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J_A_Whye · March 25, 2011, 1:10pm

I’d like a way to include a file with common code, but I don’t want to use require().

Maybe something like…

#include “navbuttons”

…that I could put into my source code and then when I launch, CPM grabs the contents of the navbuttons.lua file and puts it in place of that line. Then the “final” source file is fed to the simulator.

One thing I could use it for is to pull chunks of code out of the main source file just to make things cleaner.

Jay
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mike4 · March 29, 2011, 12:24pm

Multi-line Tabbing

I want to be able to select a block of text, and using TAB shift everything right one tab, or use SHIFT + TAB to shift everything left one tab.

CTRL-D / CMD-D to duplicate the line of code the cursor is on.

I would also like variable completion. I know you had discussed this before, and how it might be accomplished. It might be difficult, but I would like it.

And so it doesn’t drop off your list: http://developer.anscamobile.com/forum/2011/03/10/editor-prefs-not-sticking [import]uid: 5317 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 30039[/import]

J_A_Whye · March 29, 2011, 3:49pm

Yeah, not being able to indent a block of code at a time drives me bonkers – if I didn’t already know I’d be sending myself nasty-grams to get it fixed.

The editor prefs thing was fixed a couple weeks ago, I was just waiting on more changes before I released an update.

This is what’s in the version that’s on my hard drive:

Projects can be set as Active Project that’s launched no matter what project is highlighted.
After inserting autocomplete with parameters, first placeholder is highlighted.
Tabs now move to next placeholder in the line.
Editor prefs now “stick” from session to session (only affected tabbed editors).

There are 39 more items on my to-do list, and while some of them will never see the light of day, there are 6-10 that I need to get in for the next release. Now that my game is done, my attention is turning back to CPM.

My plan (at the moment) is to release a new update in about 10-14 days.

Jay
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mike4 · March 31, 2011, 9:56pm

**-=QUOTE=-…I’d like a way to include a file with common code, but I don’t want to use require().

Maybe something like…

#include “navbuttons”

…that I could put into my source code and then when I launch, CPM grabs the contents of the navbuttons.lua file and puts it in place of that line. Then the “final” source file is fed to the simulator.

One thing I could use it for is to pull chunks of code out of the main source file just to make things cleaner.

-=END QUOTE=-**

Oh please please please please.

Consider this a +1 from me. [import]uid: 5317 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 30392[/import]

deusduke · April 1, 2011, 5:31pm

I would like to have an option to have CPM use relative file paths instead of absolute. This would help us out a lot as we share files through svn. [import]uid: 37867 topic_id: 7025 reply_id: 30475[/import]