IntelliJ or any other IDE?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#41

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 Everything on the interwebs that I found was quite out-of-date and didn’t work.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.

#42

What do you mean by it lacking full parameter hinting?

Rob

#43

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.

#44

@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.

#45

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.

#46

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.

#47

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

#48

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!!

#49

I use Visual Studio Code. Love it.

#50

@roygon, @ToolBoxSystems, make sure to check the Tips-and-tricks page (https://studio.zerobrane.com/doc-tips-and-tricks) as it lists many small, but useful features that may be otherwise difficult to find. Paul.

#51

Thanks Paul, I will make sure to do that.

@roygon glad to know you are getting on well with ZBS too. I did try Lua Glider as it looked decent but I don’t think it’s being actively maintained any more tbh. Also,the latest version refused to launch on my Mac, although I just re-downlaoded it and it was OK. Anyway, I will stick with ZBS.

Regards,

Narinder.

#52

Atom - best of the best  :wink:

https://coronalabs.com/blog/2016/01/22/corona-autocomplete-package-now-available-for-atom-editor/

#53

Been a while since this thread was updated but I wanted to add another new IDE option for consideration - although this option is only viable for devs using a Mac as it’s the Corona Plugin for Xcode:

https://marketplace.coronalabs.com/asset/corona-plugin-for-xcode

The latest version has had debugger integration added. It’s a modest $19 to purchase but that is great value IMO as it gives you access to a lot of the power of Xcode, although that in itself can be a bit daunting for novice developers! Anyway, certainly a very worthy addition to the list of Corona IDE options.

Regards,

Narinder.

#54

@ToolBoxSystems. Great to hear you like it. Let me know if you have any issues or feature requests. 

Thanks, Jacob

#55

Jacob,

Hi. Well, as I finally start my adventures in Corona and Lua, I just discovered my first small issue!

The single-line comment shortcut Command + / is inserting “//” as the comment delimiter when for Lua it should be “–”. When I poke into the plugin I can see in the CoronaSDK.xclangspec file that it seems the comment single/multi-line delimiters are specified but something is not right somewhere? Any thoughts?

EDIT

I also found that auto-indentation doesn’t seem to quite work as expected, e.g. when nesting 2 ‘if’ statements then second one does not auto-indent and the matching ‘end’ statements do not outdent as one would expect. I can select the code block and hit Control + I to force the indentation to be applied so it seems that the Lua code syntax is detected.

Regards,

Narinder.

#56

@Narinder, thank you for your feedback.

I didn’t figure out how to change this yet. I don’t think the comment delimiter is defined in the xclangspec file. I don’t use this shortcut myself so I forgot to investigate it further. I will take another look at it when I get the time. 

Indentation has a couple of quirks. Make sure to turn off “Automaticlly indent based on syntax” in Preferences > Text Editing > Indentation when working with Lua code.

#57

OK thanks for the reply. I did already try to see if there was any change on the indentation beviour with that option on and off but it seemed to have to effect either way. It would be a really great enhancement if indentation “just worked” as expected but for now I can use the manual Control + I option every so often.

Regards,

Narinder.