On Mon, 13 May 2013 08:52:47 +0200
Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:

> On 2013-05-12 21:31, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > Looks interesting. Now that you mention it, I do seem to recall hearing about it back then. Personally, I've been a huge fan of Programmer's Notepad 2 <http://www.pnotepad.org/>. My #1 complaint about it though is that it's Windows-only. I want to switch to Linux for my primary system, but the lack of PN2 is one of the roadblocks (there are other roadblocks, though).
> 
> Take a look at Sublime Text. It's ridicules fast and cross platform. The only problem is that it's not free. You can download it for free and dismiss a dialog popping up once in a while.
> 
> http://www.sublimetext.com/
> 

Hmm, yea I've looked at that before. There's some nice things about it, but honestly, I can't stand non-native UIs (both looks and behavior). Plus the settings don't seem to work (tried changing one, saved, restarted, and it had no effect), and the text seems a little blurry, and I'm kind of uneasy about relying on closed-source for something I rely on as much as a text editor. Don't like being completely at some company's mercy for any changes/fixes I may need.


> > But these days I prefer RDMD-style approaches ("pass the one main source file to a cmdline tool and it figures out the rest") because they're trivially scriptable and don't cause a specific editor (or any editor at all) to become a build requirement. I find that especially important for OSS and cross-platform projects.
> 
> The problem here is when you need to use a couple of compiler switches.

That's not a true problem at all. Nobody ever said RDMD, or anything else like it, can't be invoked from another tool to provide whatever additional functionality is needed. In fact, such things already exist. But try adding on functionality using IDE-based build tools as a building block - *and* then make it work for anyone who uses a different editor.

> You need a file to put that in, usually a shell script. Unfortunately that doesn't work on Windows. So you need to duplicate that file for Windows.
> 

If all you're doing is passing a few switches to a DMD/RDMD call, then having both BAT and shell is absolutely trivial. I do it all the time myself:

1. Replace the shebang line with @echo off
2. Replace "$@" with %*
3. If you invoke anything in the current dir, remove the prefixed ./
(or change it to .\)

Done. If you need anything fancier than that (like handling steps that fail, or really any actual logic at all), then shell scripting is probably not the best idea anyway - even if you don't care about Windows at all. Just use a shell one-liner to invoke the real script.

*Or* you can just use (or create) any other compiler-invoking, or RDMD-invoking, tool that provides whatever functionality your project happens to need.

IDE-driven building is great...*if* it happens to already provide everything you need (otherwise you might be pretty much screwed - and yes, I've run into such problems before) *AND* you happen to be working in isolation with nobody else ever needing to build your code.

On 2013-05-13 23:52, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> Hmm, yea I've looked at that before. There's some nice things about it,
> but honestly, I can't stand non-native UIs (both looks and behavior).
> Plus the settings don't seem to work (tried changing one, saved,
> restarted, and it had no effect), and the text seems a little blurry,
> and I'm kind of uneasy about relying on closed-source for something I
> rely on as much as a text editor. Don't like being completely at some
> company's mercy for any changes/fixes I may need.

There are two kind of settings. System wide settings and user settings. I don't know if that had something to do with it. Don't know about the text, it looks good on Mac OS X.

> That's not a true problem at all. Nobody ever said RDMD, or anything
> else like it, can't be invoked from another tool to provide whatever
> additional functionality is needed. In fact, such things already
> exist. But try adding on functionality using IDE-based build tools
> as a building block - *and* then make it work for anyone who uses a
> different editor.

If I would use an IDE I would prefer it to invoke a build tool/rdmd, just because of this. I don't want to lock someone in, to force them use a specific editor/IDE.

> If all you're doing is passing a few switches to a DMD/RDMD call,
> then having both BAT and shell is absolutely trivial. I do it all the
> time myself:
>
> 1. Replace the shebang line with @echo off
> 2. Replace "$@" with %*
> 3. If you invoke anything in the current dir, remove the prefixed ./
> (or change it to .\)

But there's still two files that needs to be maintained. Then you need some linker switches, which are system specific. I'm not that comfortable with the linker on Windows so I'm not sure I always get the flags correctly. That's why I really would like to have a build tool that handles this. It should have a system independent way of specifying common flags, like which libraries to link with.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Tue, 14 May 2013 08:46:29 +0200
Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:

> On 2013-05-13 23:52, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > Hmm, yea I've looked at that before. There's some nice things about it, but honestly, I can't stand non-native UIs (both looks and behavior). Plus the settings don't seem to work (tried changing one, saved, restarted, and it had no effect), and the text seems a little blurry, and I'm kind of uneasy about relying on closed-source for something I rely on as much as a text editor. Don't like being completely at some company's mercy for any changes/fixes I may need.
> 
> There are two kind of settings. System wide settings and user settings. I don't know if that had something to do with it.

Hmm, yea, I don't know. I first opened the user settings, saw
it was nothing more than a blank configuration file (aside from an empty
JSON object) and didn't deal with it further. Then I went to the
"default" settings, changed "remember_open_files" from true to false,
saved, exited, checked task manager to make sure it wasn't still
running, started it again, and it auto-opened the default settings file.

I did grab the "portable install" version of it, maybe it's just broken in that? Or maybe it's just that one setting that doesn't work. I don't know, I haven't investigated further.

> Don't
> know about the text, it looks good on Mac OS X.
> 

It's possible that one could have just been my imagination, maybe because of its default color scheme being lower-contrast than I'm used to, or because it's bold and I'm used to non-bold. I dunno. OTOH, I have noticed Apple seems to like heavy anti-aliasing (or at least heavier than I like), so maybe you're just used to it ;)


> > If all you're doing is passing a few switches to a DMD/RDMD call, then having both BAT and shell is absolutely trivial. I do it all the time myself:
> >
> > 1. Replace the shebang line with @echo off
> > 2. Replace "$@" with %*
> > 3. If you invoke anything in the current dir, remove the prefixed ./
> > (or change it to .\)
> 
> But there's still two files that needs to be maintained.

True, but they're very small, few in number, and updated in lockstep. So it's entirely feasable and nowhere near as painful as, say, C/C++ headers.

But that said, yea, I'd also certainly prefer only having one file to update.

> Then you
> need some linker switches, which are system specific. I'm not that
> comfortable with the linker on Windows so I'm not sure I always get
> the flags correctly. That's why I really would like to have a build
> tool that handles this. It should have a system independent way of
> specifying common flags, like which libraries to link with.
> 

Yea, I agree. (Although that's orthogonal to "IDE-based building" vs "CLI-based building": In either case, having to specify linker-specific switches manually is bad, and having it nicely abstracted (when possible) is good.)

On Monday, 13 May 2013 at 21:52:28 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Mon, 13 May 2013 08:52:47 +0200
> Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Take a look at Sublime Text. It's ridicules fast and cross platform.
>> The only problem is that it's not free. You can download it for free
>> and dismiss a dialog popping up once in a while.
>> 
>> http://www.sublimetext.com/
>> 
>
> Hmm, yea I've looked at that before. There's some nice things about it,
> but honestly, I can't stand non-native UIs (both looks and behavior).
> Plus the settings don't seem to work (tried changing one, saved,
> restarted, and it had no effect), and the text seems a little blurry,
> and I'm kind of uneasy about relying on closed-source for something I
> rely on as much as a text editor. Don't like being completely at some
> company's mercy for any changes/fixes I may need.
>

Are you using a higher DPI? If so, you'd want to disable DPI scaling (32-bit version only, Rightclick -> Properties -> Compatability) and just increase the font size. Otherwise, it'll be rendering text at a lower resolution and appear blurry and ugly.