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At work we are using a proprietary language and to program we are using Notepad++ with a simple code highlight. That is really annoying so, what I want to do is to invest some time to setup a text editor or an existing IDE to support my language.

I've googled a lot and there are so many options and before starting to work I wanna ask to you what is the best choice. What I want to do is to have, like an IDE, a syntax highlight, a window with the function list tree, with the local function variables inside the same subtree, maybe text autocomplete (if I type "pro" I would like to see the suggestion "procedure" and if I press enter it will write for me something like

procedure "name" {
   --code--
}

with the cursor on "name" ready to change it. etc etc...

Can you suggest me the right path to follow? Is it to keep using Notepad++? With sourcecookifier? functionlist? Or I have to change to another text editor? Or there is some famous IDE like Eclipse, NetBeans etc that allow to easily add my own language?

PS. my language is pretty simple, I don't have complex structures, is Pascal-like. Something like that:

variable int  xyz
PROCEDURE asd
BEGIN
END PROCEDURE asd
psxls
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Dedanan
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4 Answers4

1

I would recommend you to stay with Notepad++ and extend it with some plugins and configuration. This would be fairly quick and easy to set up and still give a big win, even though you might not be able to get all the nice features of something like Eclipse. But since you already know the Notepad++ it wouldn't require learning an entirely new tool.

Some plugins that I have found useful

There are probably a lot more that can be useful to you.

Notepad++ also got some built in auto-completion functionality that can be enabled in the settings.

ellak
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1

Have you evaluated Eclipse XTEXT ?

What is Xtext?

Xtext is a framework for development of programming languages and domain specific languages.

Community
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Paul Verest
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0

The only IDE I have used for the last few years is Eclipse. There are lots of other IDEs available, also notable and popular is Netbeans. There are many others. It's important to note that all IDEs have their fans, but I can only speak to Eclipse.

Eclipse is a platform, which means it is an application on which you can build other applications. Eclipse provides a framework which you can customize and extend to produce a working application. It takes care of the user interface, preferences storage, modularisation using OSGi, and lots of other things.

Eclipse has facilities to support what you're looking for:

  • Syntax highlighting in the editor.
  • The Outline View provides function and variable listing in a tree
  • Autocompletion and Suggestions (activated by hitting ctrl-space)
  • Code Templates to fill out files and procedures etc.

The disadvantage is that customising and extending Eclipse to do what you want isn't trivial. Having written a language debugger for Eclipse, I can tell you that leveraging Eclipse's platform helped enormously, but there's a learning curve. You'd essentially have to be coming up with a new set of plugins to provide your highlighting, outlining, autocomplete suggestions and templates (I'm not sure if template support is built into the platform or not).

So I would say, unless you can find some sort of extensible editor for Eclipse - I know Aptana is extensible for tag-based markup - you are probably as well staying with your existing tooling.

Do explore the other IDEs though - I've heard good things about IDEA as well as Netbeans. :)

Good luck!

Faelkle
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I can recommend SynWrite editor. Good support for external languages, fully customizable. (Editor of new lexers is there)

Prog1020
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