Community

YAFR (Yet another feature request ):

I'd really like to see some kind of a macro language, as available in other editors.
The semware editor was good at this several years ago already, UltraEdit's macro support isn't too bad either. Of course the "uppermost of the "toppermost" is Emacs' support for macros.
But I don't ask for that much.
It would be completely OK for me to have macros that are

• Editable macros (Well, you can edit the current macro files too...)
  OK, how about: Editable, human readable and human understandable macros
• I'd like do be able to pass arguments to the macros (numbers, strings, regexes...)
• Not to forget the usual loops, branching etc.
• Exception support (No wait! I'm just kidding. That's really not necessary)

Cheers

Stephan

If anyone votes less than "Important, even if ...", please provide us your email address, phone number and home address (and times you can be reached, of course), so we can all harrass you.

I think it is the main feature missing in TextPad

When (not IF ) added, please use a third party language (like Python) and don't develop your own macro language.

One word: Yes.

Frank Fesevur wrote:When (not IF ) added, please use a third party language (like Python) and don't develop your own macro language.

I agree 100%. Why reinvent the wheel when you can choose from many excellent text-handling scripting languages out there. I am partial to TCL myself (http://dev.scriptics.com).

Please not Perl!!!

CJ, Nial recommended that I look at PERL because of some of these hairy S/R functions I have to do. I am not a programmer though, and your post is, er, well . . . could a novice use PERL?

And then my second question, are these MACRO scripts difficult for a non-programmer like me to pick up? Have a good suggestion for a beginner like me? Thanks.

You asked:

And then my second question, are these MACRO scripts difficult for a non-programmer like me to pick up? Have a good suggestion for a beginner like me?

I highly recommend Macro Scheduler. I have mentioned it a number of times in this forum.

Excellent support, excellent forum (uses same forum software as TextPad).

I disagree, I don't think Textpad should become a programming language unto itself. Macro support is about the biggest "gravy" feature I can imagine in a text editor. In theory, I suppose this could be useful to the serious programmers using textpad, but I place a number of other requests ahead of this, because I think they would benefit more of the userbase, more of the time.

Python as a macro language would push my rating of TextPad from 12 to 30 on a scale of 10.

The particular choice of language doesn't mean much to me - so long as the current binary format is replaced/augmented with a human readable one, I'm happy.
If the binary format was documented, someone could probably write a simple assembler/compiler for it.
--Joel

As far as I know there is some activity in finding out how the marcos are compiled. After having found out enough about hte current macros, I suppose the next step would be to create a macro compiler-or-whatever-you-call-it.

If there are plans in making an already existing programming language, I'd vote for
a) not starting a language war [1]
b) offering an API for use with several languages. 8)
c) not even considering Ook or Brainf***

Anyway I'm doing a lot of text processing in my-currently-favourite-language already, so I'm not depending on that feature anylonger that much...

Have a good day, night (at my place), dawn or sunset!

Stephan


[1] but would kindly vote for Ruby anyway.

This would be a great feature for Textpad. There have been several requests for certain already existing scripting languages. Of course I have my own favorite language for such things, and it is TECO, but I don't expect anyone else to want that. Inventing your own language would be just fine.

Choice of scripting language?

A big YES vote goes to PHP, obviously, as it's designed as a text-processing language, and the code looks almost like C/C++.

Another YES vote goes to the new kid on the block, Python. Others have voted for this. The syntax is line-oriented, not block oriented (so blocks are marked by indentation instead of braces) so it looks a little strange to those accustomed to C/C++/Java/Javascript/etc. I'd prefer PHP, but I could live with Python.

And finally, a big NO to Perl. No way. Absolutely no way. We're way past unreadable Perl scripts these days. Let's not bring them back.

Jill

On re-reading the thread, I'd go further and suggest a full command language. I don't know how many people here are familiar with sam (the unicode text editor from plan 9), but it makes a case for having a command language even in a mouse-centered editor.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/9down4 ... portok=yes has sam for windows among other things.

--Joel