2 Ideas for making programers' life easier

#1

I’m not a programer, yet I did try myself in that here and there and all that amount of text makes life so hard I got with 2 ideas I hope someone will take into consideration:

The developing environment that lets the programmer typing his lines, already recognizes the variety of text and paints it in the right colors for easier identification.

  1. Why shouldn’t such an environment enable hiding / showing notes? Sometimes I don’t want to see the notes, so all the program gets much smaller and cleaner (when I know and remember the program very well).

  2. What about collapsing and expanding bunchs of program-lines (bunches, I mean like in a function, if-then-else, for etc.? - when they start with { and finish with })? So you can collapse bunchs of program-lines that don’t interest you and read all above and below of it in one time.

so, for all developing environments (if there’s anyone here, after all it’s a cg community…), here’s my 5 cents.

#2

This is already supported by most IDE’s. It’s called code folding. Not sure if most IDEs fold single-line comment blocks, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen IDE’s that fold c-style comments.

#3

Nice to hear there’s such stuff already out there, I’m just a bit frustrating after trying to work with flash action script, and remembering my frustration when I tried working with max script once.

Anyway, I sent similiar comment to autodesk and adobe regarding to their products, hopefuly they take those ideas into consideration.

As I said, I’m not a programer so I really don’t know what is out there (ah… in the programing world, don’t confuse me with the bubble boy! (Seinfeld joke :stuck_out_tongue: ))

#4

Well, action script and max script aren’t really programming languages…

That said I don’t think there’s anything stopping you using a different editor to those supplied by the host application. Only a masochist would use Maya’s script editor for coding MEL.

Scite is a good programmer’s editor. And there’s plenty more available.

#5

I guess you mean that flash and max are not programing environments (but graphic programs), yet i won’t agree that it should stop them from such features, after all maxscript has a GUI like in Visual Basic, for putting objects and stuff, and Flash has some very comfortable GUI starting from painting the text till the beginner mode.

Anyway, thanks for the link, it’s nice to see the code folding feature there - as a designer I can say that it could be more aesthetic and clear (not talking about fancy graphics, but a better choice of colors - I like the bright gray color for notes flash uses (look at preferences, yes yes… :p), the code folding’s horizontal lines are too dark and interupt the floating of reading, I’d make them much brighter. I do like that the notes are not in a monotype font, helping they’re readability.

As you see, I’m here to complain and giving advices :p, lol, after all, I’m a designer, and don’t really use programing for life, so I don’t need those programs very much, and won’t bother check them. Yet I do like finding places for improvements, as a designer… :slight_smile:

#6

there’s a whole host of IDEs and text editors out there that will offer what you want.

I love Eclipse as an integrated environment but Notepad++ is a great little light-weight editor (and lots of people swear by emacs).

With most of these you can choose the colours that are displayed and Notepad++ allows you to vary the colour based on the language you are writing in.

I have to admit that you did make me smile - suggesting something that’s been around for years :slight_smile:

#7

It’s not the end! I have a lot of ideas that’ve been around for years! ie. the wheel, the bell and a dog!

Anyway, I wish to see those features in flash and 3dMax - Hate working with more programs only because a small feature is missing. And specially if I need to jump between those 2 for compiling etc. though I bet you’d say there’s an automatic integration between them I won’t even notice I’m working with 2 programs :stuck_out_tongue:

#8

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.