RAD Studio XE Editor Enhancements
There are a couple other little editor enhancements in RAD Studio XE that I wanted to highlight:
Templates In Code Completion
Code Templates have appeared in the code completion list for several releases. However, the code completion list has just shown the name of the code template. Often, the template name is not descriptive enough to know what the code template will do. In RAD Studio XE, the description of the code template will now also appear in the completion list:
Code Template Completion
Code Templates are one of the most powerful features of the RAD Studio code editor. This little enhancement should help to make them even easier to use.
Brace Highlighting
Brace Highlighting
Brace Highlighting is another great editor feature that has been in RAD Studio for several releases. Personally, I find it invaluable for writing and debugging complex expressions. But, it is not popular with everyone. In RAD Studio XE, there is now a checkbox in the Editor Options (Tools/Options/Editor Options) for "Highlight brace pairs". It is checked by default and unchecking it will disable the Brace Highlighting feature.
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Posted by Darren Kosinski on September 8th, 2010 under C++Builder, Code Editor Features, Delphi, RAD Studio |
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September 8th, 2010 at 3:44 pm
No descriptions are displayed for the CC templates when just pressing Ctrl+J though.
September 8th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
@Moritz: Please QC this.
September 8th, 2010 at 4:48 pm
[...] Darren Kosinski » RAD Studio XE Editor Enhancements blogs.embarcadero.com/darrenkosinski/2010/09/08/43/ – view page – cached There are a couple other little editor enhancements in RAD Studio XE that I wanted to highlight: Tweets about this link [...]
September 8th, 2010 at 6:32 pm
Finally! I entered that request as QC 58433 back in february of 2008.
Someone should really pop into the QC database and mark it as resolved instead of open.
September 8th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
How about an option for making the brace highlighting work on the closing brace *before* the cursor rather than the one after it? That way that feature would actually be useful already while typing the code rather than just while analyzing it…
September 9th, 2010 at 5:04 am
I love the idea that there are dozens of little things like this in new releases that aren’t listed as big ticket features, but still make our lives easier.
@Uwe,
Xepol’s report and QC 48535 both mention Ctrl+J. Unfortunately, this means neither is actually finished, yet.
September 9th, 2010 at 9:25 am
I agree with Oliver Giesen. You always have to back up one position to see what the match is for the character you just typed.
September 9th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
@Moritz, @Uwe, @Xepol: Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I’ll see what can be done to show the descriptions in the Ctrl+J window as well. I think the existing QC reports on this are adequate.
@Oliver, @David: That sounds like something that would be useful, but also polarizing. Changing the behavior would have to be optional. Please put this in QC and vote for it. Votes really do matter for raising the visibility of QC reports. Thanks.
@Bruce: This is one of the benefits of developing RAD Studio with RAD Studio. We have a strong motivation to make our own lives easier and these little tweaks make their way into the product.
September 9th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
@Darren -> It would only be polarizing if it wasn’t optional. Ok, that’s not true. For some reason some people got bug-nuts even when the feature IS optional.
When its something really complicated and can break stuff or the result is 2 new behaviours neither of which is the original, then I could see being disturbed - but some people do just seem to freakout when they see any change. I would dial down the reception on those who fall into the upset just because its different but the same catagory. The rest of us know how to read that kind of angst when it shows up.
September 12th, 2010 at 3:08 am
I have one question for XE: why we have not the possibility to changes fonts sizez for the IDE components? I mean toolbars, object inspector and so on.
For my monitor with the 2600×1400 resolution fonts are really very small.
September 13th, 2010 at 7:32 am
@Vladimir: You can use the Windows settings for large fonts to increase the text size within the IDE. There are also two QC entries that you may want to consider voting for: QC 59199 and QC 71128. Product management reviews QC entries to find feature requests for each version. Entries with a lot of votes do carry more weight than those with no or few votes.