jj,
Where we differ is in something very fundamental, the idea of automated actions combining a number of things together. While it is no big deal to auto-format in much the same way as the old GFABASIC editor, long ago I learnt that it comes with a multitude of evils. When it does something that you don't want, you have to try and undo it and with auto formatting, that is not always an easy task.
I wanted back then a pure ASCII editor which I eventually wrote that was entirely free of automated actions. My later editors all have the same brain, NO automated combined actions, each user choice is a separate action, not something the editor overrides. A liking for pure ASCII characteristics delivers a predictable and reliable means of writing code.
Now they do have a few tricks, block indent, tabs replaced with spacers and a reliable autoindent that does what it was designed to do, indent the following line with the same indent as the current one.
Dear Hutch,
Of course, I understand your KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) logic, and for a n00b who arrives here to write his first "Hello World", it's perfect. However, at currently over 6,000 source files in *.asc format, my needs are different. The n00b learns to drive, so a simple, small car is perfect for him; I need a Mercedes, a Bentley or a Tesla.
You are not a fan of MRU's, for example. Ok for n00bs, but I struggle with my 29 files limit.
Your Find & Replace dialog is Windows standard, mine is
very advanced
Your F3 key makes the user jump to the next found item, I need to see the hundreds of matches in my 30k LOC source.
QEditor has no
history, and that's ok. But I work on a source that, according to MS Word, has 634 pages. If I have to switch all the time between pages 9, 512 and 312, I appreciate that I can do it by simply pressing Alt arrow left/right, because RichMasm remembers the last 8 edit places.
QEditor has no
shortcut keys, and that's ok for n00bs. But I appreciate that
ism<space> expands to
invoke SendMessage, - typing that a hundred times is tiresome. \Masm32\MasmBasic\Res\Keywords.ini has over a hundred shortcuts, and most of them I've never used. But I would go mad if I didn't have that feature.
Do I need over 30 entries in the Help menu? Not every day, and not all of them.
Do I need 15
AutoCode entries? Not every day, and not all of them, sure, but I need them, and I also need the tooltips in the menu explaining to me what each of them does.
Do I need manual colouring to understand a tricky sequence that I coded 10 years ago? Absolutely, I would be lost without that feature.
Could I live without WinAPI tooltips, see below in the lower left corner? Difficult.
Could I live without bookmarks, see below? NO.
You are a prolific coder, too, and I have a deep respect of your work for this site. That you can do that without a MRU list is, ehm, interesting. Maybe we just have very different coding styles: you work sequentially, i.e. you finish one library item at a time, while I have always a dozen projects running in parallel, and never finish them ;-)
Keep up the good work
