IntelliJ or any other IDE?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Is there any up-to-date IDE that can be used for Corona development? The two dedicated options (Glider and Project Manager) haven’t been updated in years, and the instructions for getting Corona to work with IntelliJ (which would be my preferred IDE) use very old plugins, not all of which are available anymore.

If anyone has gotten Corona to play nice with a modern IDE I’d love to know how you did it. I have been using IntelliJ for my job for a few years now, and trying to develop with just a text editor has been grating.

#2

using notepad++ with autocomplete (lua language selected) it is my partner from day one. tried sublime text, it seams more powerful but i got used to notepad++…the speed of producing code is just limited by my capability of thinking. before notepad++ i used notepad on old days of C and on Unix machines, VI editor, so notepad++ is kinda a “huge” improvement from them. tried IntelliJ for corona, uninstalled same day.

#3

Loved Glider, but moved on to ZeroBrane.

#4

Get ZeroBrane, the best Lua IDE there is.

One feature every developer should use is Analyze (under the Project menu). I’ve seen too many bugs from other people’s source files that would have been caught with this feature alone.

Download the executable from the original site, then update to the latest from Github:

https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBraneStudio

#5

i tried using ZeroBrane, but it don’t have double tap like notepad++, to select all the variables of that name on the document. i use it alot. The coloring on notepad help me more to identify what i want also. the only think i liked about ZeroBrane is the Analyze. i will use it when i finish my code to detect any error i missed myself. thanks for the tip.

#6

I’m usingText Sublime 3 with Corona Editor plugin.

#7

You can do pretty anything in ZeroBrane because it is written in Lua and you can access the IDE internals.

To select all variables, simply hold the Command key and double-click on the variable. Then you can start typing to make changes to all the instances of that variable name.

You can also change highlighting colors and make further modifications in settings.

#8

Control (Windows) or Command (Mac) and double-click will highlight all instances of a variable.

You can also highlight a variable and use the “Find In Files” command to get a list in the search window below your code window.  Double-clicking on it in that window will take you to it in your code.

–john

#9

@carloscosta, as @schizoid2k and @qwidave already suggested, you can use Control/Cmd with double click to select instances of a variable (this selection is scope-aware and will only select instances of the same variable even if there may be a variable with the same name in a different block), but there are also plugins that extend core functionality in different ways. For example, HighlighSelected (https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBranePackage/blob/master/highlightselected.lua) auto-selects all instances of a selected word, DocumentMap (https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBranePackage/blob/master/documentmap.lua) shows minimap of the document, AnalyzeAll (https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBranePackage/blob/master/analyzeall.lua) that does analysis for all files in the project, and many others in the repository (https://github.com/pkulchenko/ZeroBranePackage). Paul.

#10

There is a feature request to add Corona support to Intellij. http://feedback.coronalabs.com/forums/188732-corona-sdk-feature-requests-feedback/suggestions/11438721–plugin-intellij-support

You can always vote this up. This is a great thing for someone who knows Intellij to provide this feature.

Rob

#11

I use intellij with the Lua plugin.

#12

Thanks, @schizoid2k, @qwidave and @paulclinger. I will give ZeroBrane another shot.

#13

Hello everybody. This is my first post. I am just gettting started with Lua and Corona SDK and the first thing I looked for was a decent IDE. So far, the only functioning option is ZeroBrane Studio - it’s mostly stable, quite usable and integrates with Corona Simulator seemlessly.

However one significant deficiency with Zerobrane, unless I’m mistaken and somebody can advise how to fix this, is ZeroBrane’s lack of full parameter hinting for Corona SDK APIs.

So, I downloaded IntelliJ IDEA CE as I already use PhpStorm from JetBrains - their IDEs rock IMO. But despite a ton of Googling I made little progress on getting it fully integrated with Corona SDK. Can anybody provide detailed instructions? Everything on the interwebs that I found was quite out-of-date and didn’t work.

User Imgualandi above suggests he is using IntelliJ with Lua plugin - not sure if he means full integration with Corona SDK/Simulator though? Maybe he can comment.

Regards,

Narinder.

#14

What do you mean by it lacking full parameter hinting?

Rob

#15

Hi. Actually, after exploring further I realised it was my bad and due to my limited understanding of the SDK APIs. What caused me initial confusion was when using  display.newText it only gave the parameter hint as options , but of course this parameter is a table! So, the parameter hint was as expected - I delved into the applicaton package and took at look at api/lua/corona.lua to confirm this.

Regards,

Narinder.

#16

@ToolBoxSystems, yes, the auto-complete description should closely match the official one as it’s based on the files I get from Corona. In fact, I just updated the descriptions for v2017.3068 the other day, so it should be in sync with the latest public release.

Speaking about notepad++, the current dev version of ZeroBrane Studio includes syntax highlighting and folding support for 110+ languages and formats (thanks to scintillua integration), so can be used for more than just Lua projects. The lexers are also written in Lua, so plugins can add their own custom lexers and register them with the IDE. Both of these changes (along with many other improvements) will be included in the next ZBS release. Paul.

#17

I launch the Corona simulator separately. The IDE gives me features like lua syntax highlighting, refactoring variables, version management, but it still don’t have full integration Corona. I never tried Zerobrane, though.

#18

Thanks all for responses. I will stick with ZeroBrane Studio as it’s a nice IDE that really just works out of the box. Kudos to Paul for this building and maintaining this IDE.

On a side note regarding the Corona Simulator, does anybody know how to turn off the rather annoying sound (aside from simply muting my Mac of course) that it emits every time it reloads a project with Syntax errors? As I’m experimenting a lot I find it’s useful to have a project auto reload in the Simulator whwen I save a file in the IDE for speed and of course I will often have errors in my code that I then need to fix!

Regards,

Narinder.

#19

@ToolBoxSystems, thank you for the feedback! Let me know if you run into any other issues. Paul.

#20

I’ve been using Lua Glider for a couple of years - seemed like the best option even though it crashes constantly on windows and mac - I save now without even thinking every time I write a line of code knowing that a crash is just around the corner… as of the last few days it switches to trial mode and times out after 15 minutes.  I can enter my serial code and it takes it and then back to trial…

Going to buy ZeroBrane right now, thanks for letting me know about this ide

UPDATE: Oh wow, there really is no comparison between ZeroBrane and Lua Glider, so much better in every way.  I feel twice as productive and I’m only just learning how to use it.  Thanks!!