Text Editor

[Wardancer]

Hi,

this is my first forum entry.

I have been learning with this site the last couple of weeks and made great progress.

 

So thanks a lot to those amazing people who build this page.

 

Here and there I stumpbled over small things in the tutorials that strike me as mistakes or somewhat unclear, that have been tampering with my learning effort.

 

Nevertheless, not why I'm posting.

 

 

So far I have familiarised myself with HTML, JS and CSS and only have mildly looked into server communication and operations.

 

I am working on a turn based game right now in an effort to learn these languages better.

 

Progress has been good so far, but I'm at a point where the coding interface feels improveable at times.

 

 

I originally started using Notepad++ because it was recommended (I believe),

Now that the code had gotten more complex I was looking for alternatives.

The first I stumbled upon was Netbeans, then turned to Sublime Text 3, from there went on to Brackets and am now back stuck with Notepad ++.

 

I am not really happy with either of those programs and was hoping you guys could maybe help me to find a solution.

 

Here is what has been bothering me with the respective coding-interfaces:

 

Auto-Text-Completition, important

Notepad (+)

Netbeans(-)(only when clicking ctrl+space)

Sublime Text 3 (+)

Brackets (+)

 

When working with Notepad I kinda got used to using rather long variable names. They were easy to use and it was easier to replace them with search and replace than short variables.

When I switched to Netbeans I found myself really struggeling with long variables eventually reverting to use 1-3 letter abbrevations eventually.

Realising this difference in style and the discomfort with all this I eventually started looking for new alternatives and stumbled over Sublime Text.

 

Function List, important

Notepad(+)

Netbeans(+)

Sublime Text 3 (-) (disappears when using it)

Brackets (-) (disappears when using it)

 

Brackets Highlighting, important

Notepad (+)

Netbeans (+)

Sublime Text 3 (-) (only underlines brackets but it's almost invisible and essentially useless for spotting mistakes)

Brackets (+)

 

Sublime Text came highly recommended so I really wanted to give it a try. I was playing around with the themes and undeniably it looked amazing. But functionally I really hated it.

The missing function list I almost didn't want to endure but the missing Bracket Highlighting was just impossible to deal with.

Fortunatly I quickly figured out that there was a whole list of plugins to make Sublime Text bearable.

Unfortunatly installing them was a real thread... It took me almost a day to finally get an installation tool installed.

But even AFTER you had the installation plugin installed you still had to scower through a whole list of commands, just to click somewhere and check was impossible.

 

Well, I was about two days into working with sublime text and had finally figured out how to install the bracket highlighting. Several instruction suggested I had to restart after installation, did so, but the bracket highlighting just didn't work.

I kept trying things until I eventually gave up, realising that there existed no plugin to ever fix the issue with the function list.

 

Drag&Drop, important

Notepad(+)

Netbeans(+)

Sublime Text 3 (+)

Brackets (-)

 

My next stop was Brackets, although I wanted to give it a try I soon realised that it essentially was exactly like Sublime Text. I was conflicted whether to try it for a couple of days but ultimatively it was a commercial program.

It did (omg yes) support bracket highlighting. (You'd expect that with the name of the edior).

But then no Drag&Drop, no functions list and being commercial I sort of realised that this program was really not worth my time.

After all these experiences I eventually realised that the program I originally had used actually had all the features I wanted and went back to Notepad++.

 

JSlint support, so-so

Notepad (-) (only lists like 5% and not inline after installing plugin)

Netbeans (+)

Sublime Text (-) (plugin exists but straightout doesn't do anything)

Brackets (-) (only lists like 5% and not inline after installing plugin)

 

variable highlighting, so-so

Notepad (-)

Netbeans (-) (can sort of tell global variables apart from local ones, but doesn't differentiate between global variables that are defined within the current databank and between such from foreign databanks)

Sublime Text 3 (-) (can sort of tell global variables apart from local ones, but doesn't differentiate between global variables that are defined within the current databank and between such from foreign databanks)

Brackets (-) (can sort of tell global variables apart from local ones, but doesn't differentiate between global variables that are defined within the current databank and between such from foreign databanks)

 

Besides the poor theme look, I soon realised that I dearly miss those mentioned functionalities from the other editors. Also Notepad++ does not seem to color strings, numbers and URL's differently.

 

 

Tl/dr:

So my question is:

From the listed functionalities, is there a text editor/IDE with an amount of plugins I could use to access all those features. And if I need plugins for that, which would they be?

 

 

Thank you for taking the time to listen to my issue and thank you for any given help.

Amazing site!

[justsomeguy]

I use Sublime without any plugins at all and it's fine for me. As far as bracket highlighting goes, I'm not sure quite what you're looking for but if you press Ctrl-M it will jump to the matching bracket. There are a ton of keyboard shortcuts to do all kinds of things. I did change some of the settings and keybindings to match what I'm used to though. This is my user preferences file:

{	"auto_complete_commit_on_tab": true,	"color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/Twilight.tmTheme",	"detect_indentation": false,	"font_face": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",	"font_size": 10,	"highlight_line": true,	"tab_size": 2,	"translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,	"trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true}

And my user keymap file:

[  { "keys": ["ctrl+y"], "command": "run_macro_file", "args": {"file": "Packages/Default/Delete Line.sublime-macro"} },  { "keys": ["ctrl+tab"], "command": "next_view" },  { "keys": ["ctrl+shift+tab"], "command": "prev_view" }]

Everything else is set to factory settings, although I'm using version 2, I haven't looked at version 3 yet.As far as "function list", again I'm not sure specifically what you're looking for, but if I'm working on a PHP file, for example, and type the beginning of a function, like "str", it will pop up a list of built-in functions that match. The first one listed is strcasecmp. What that highlighted, if I press tab, it inserts this:

strcasecmp(str1, str2)

I like the pattern matching that it uses, particular for variable names. If I have variables like imagePath and thumbImagePath, and I type "thpath", the first thing it highlights for replacement is thumbImagePath. It's good at figuring out which variable you're looking for if you can type a few parts of the name.

[Wardancer]

I guess with bracket highlighting I imagine something like a flashing yellow or red background on the bracket when I go over it with the typewriter cursor..

It isn't about finding the beginning or end of the bracket but just to see that everything is in order when scrolling quickly through the document...

If I already have identified the correct bracket that is causing problems, I'm not going to need to jump at the beginning or end...

 

I guess shortcuts I can use in Notepad too, so I'll stick with it for now, but still thanks for help. Appreciated.

[justsomeguy]

One of the things I like about Sublime is how customizable it is. It looks like you can modify the theme file to change the selected bracket style, you could have it change the foreground font color instead of underline, for example, and specify the color. There's a description about some of it here:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10372004/how-to-change-style-of-matched-brackets-in-sublime-text-2-3That includes a link to this page which talks about the various options for the theme file:http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3007#p14196