Find function in the text/script editor?

[Martin Howe]

I have started to replace WinTex with XWE, in readiness for eventual use of Windows XP 64 (no 16-bit support). XWE seems to be a reasonable replacement, though I am still learning how to do things. However, one serious problem is the lack of a "find" function when editing lumps such as DECORATE or DEHACKED. It is hampering me quite a bit; I have to save the lump to a file, edit it, then reload it.

Any chance of this? Full vi regexps would be nice eventually, but right now, even a find fixed text with a case/nocase option would be nice.

[Csabo]

If you have the Codemax 2.0 control installed, XWE uses that. Edit large files, syntax highlighting, find/replace, etc. See the topic below on where to get it:

http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=34816&highlight=codemax+2.0

[Martin Howe]

Thanks that has find/replace and so on.

Now how do I force CodeMax to save its settings? For example, if I turn off syntax highlighting, or change the font, it just comes back again.

[Csabo]

The font is hardcoded. I figured it wouldn't be a big job to save then restore the user selected font though, but when I sat down to code it, I found that CodeMax has stopped functioning on my machine :-( So it doesn't look good.

Why would you turn off syntax highlighting though? It's so helpful. If you don't want it, you could just edit the XWE.INI file anyway. The only reason XWE knows what are the keywords is because the INI file lists them. If you change it from "Editor : ScriptEditor,DEHACKED" to "Editor : ScriptEditor", the highlighting should go away.

[Martin Howe]

Csabo said:

The font is hardcoded. I figured it wouldn't be a big job to save then restore the user selected font though, but when I sat down to code it, I found that CodeMax has stopped functioning on my machine :-( So it doesn't look good.

Bummer!

Csabo said:

Why would you turn off syntax highlighting though? It's so helpful.

Not with the defaults that CodeMax uses; the mass of varying fonts, colours and styles distract from reading the actual content. For example, comments in a different colour are fine, but the bright colour and italics kill it - they make the comments more noticable than the actual code; comments should be "just noticable in the background but easy to find when you need to refer to them". For another example, the braces (scope identifiers) are highlighted, not just the keywords; weird and, again, distracting. If you want a good example of "syntax highlighting done right", look at DoomBuilder's SCRIPT editor or the C/C++ defaults in EditPlus.

In complicated languages such as C or Pascal, syntax highlighting is a great help; but for a simple language such as DECORATE, syntax-based formatting is arguably overkill anyway and with the clumsy defaults that CodeMax uses, it actually gets in the way. If I can't customize it, I'd like to turn it off, but CodeMax doesn't even store that setting and editing XWE.INI (I tried it) doesn't help because that only affects keywords - comments are still in italics and braces are still blue :)

In other words, all I want is basic text manipulation functions: good solid functionality, without gloss and glitz!

I know it wouldn't be a simple or quick job and it's nice of you to release XWE as freeware anyway, so thanks very much! However, since your chosen choice of text-editing control is broken, could you at least include some basic functionality in the text editor or the option to use the standard text-editor controls on platforms that have them?

[Csabo]

When you said it's broken, did you mean on my computer? That's not that big of a deal, it still works on my machine at work. The control itself is not broken, and you can do what you've asked for simply by editing the XWE.INI file. Try this: look for the (DEHACKED) entry, then comment out these two lines:

;SingleLineComments : #
;Operators : =,+,|

This way it will still highlight the keywords in blue, but nothing else.

As for adding Find/Replace functions to the regular textbox, I might do it, but it's a low priority.

[Martin Howe]

OK, I tried some of your suggestions and got it looking about as near as possible to what I want as one can get by such methods.

Thanks very much for your help.

[Csabo]

No problem.

I made some changes for you. Grab the latest beta (you can find the link from the XWE homepage). I added two things: the font you select in the CodeMax control and your choice of syntax highlighting on/off is now persistent across sessions. So you can just turn it off once, and you're done.

I realized that there are some more elements that are defined, but these are hardcoded into XWE. So I will have to add these elements to the XWE.INI file (so that if you desire, you can turn them off/modify them etc).

[Martin Howe]

Thanks, downloading now!