Editor with these features

@zander

Posted by: @zander

I wonder if there is an editor (free if possible) that can do the following.

1. Replace the lines 546 through 549 with a single line that says lines 546 to 549 excluded. It does that because I 'assigned' the variable the #if is looking at the true value. I think Visual Slickedit (I used to have 5 licenses) can do that but at $400 USD too expensive.

2. Allow the exclude command to be applied 'over' the line numbers. The cmd can be x, a block of code as in xx ..... xx or xnnnn lines. I want to exclude all lines in a module then using another line cmd tell the editor to show me all the lines at logic level 1, etc, then I can continue drilling down. I had that capability on the mainframe, called SPF. I did find a Windows freeware that works like SPF but nothing for Mac.

 

As far as I know:

1) AFAIK, notepad++ has some plugins allowing you to do that, and editors such as Vim and Emacs etc..., and likewise tools such as 'awk', 'grep' and 'sed', etc... allow you to do that from the command line too.  Alternatively, it shouldn't be too hard for a programmer to write such functionality using your preferred shell.

2) You can exclude files in the new Arduino IDE (as shown in a recent reply to you), but portions of files to be excluded seems a very specific request, that I doubt you will find easily, unless coding it yourself.  Do you really need that functionality? I mean, are your projects that large, and how often would you perform such a search?

If you want to dive deeper into search results, then look into (re)piping grep etc... results back into a supported utility to refine your search.

Of course, you can use macros if you like to exclude a specific block/range of code, but this is not too different that just using a multi line comment:

Cheers

@frogandtoad When I worked on mainframes we had an editor called SPF. It could do the exclude either by line or logic level. In the new IDE you can only exclude where it gives you the > symbol, at an If or function. I also now see it aloso does it for #ifdef so that helps but simply replacing the value of a define is faster in that it is global like many editors allow. Some call it selective display. I got just last night a freeware version of SPF but it is windows only. The search continues.

@frogandtoad As I think I already said, the mainframe editor had the eXclude a line feature and when looking at new code it is handy to read and understand a block of say an if clause of 5 lines which is 20% of the screen bandwidth since normally our screens are oriented the wrong way. It wouldn't be so bad if I had a 27" screen and use a 2up display but nowadays I am limited to a laptop. Maybe when I 'go ashore' I will get the 27", but I will be almost 82 then and how many more years will I be doing this? You are the second today to mention notepad++. I will have to check it out, the last time I ran across something with the same or similar name it wasn't very powerful so maybe it's time to re-check that option.

@frogandtoad Notepad++ seems to be Windows only.

@zander

Posted by: @zander

@frogandtoad When I worked on mainframes we had an editor called SPF. It could do the exclude either by line or logic level. In the new IDE you can only exclude where it gives you the > symbol, at an If or function. I also now see it aloso does it for #ifdef so that helps but simply replacing the value of a define is faster in that it is global like many editors allow. Some call it selective display. I got just last night a freeware version of SPF but it is windows only. The search continues.

I don't really know too much about mainframes, but I did work in a large financial system which did use the COBAL mainframe language, and I personally used INFOMAN as a support analyst under that environment!

INFOMAN (was, and still is the go to incident management system) for a many financial systems!)

Again, are your projects so large that you need it?
Or, are you just wanting to reaffirm your knowledge?

Cheers

@frogandtoad I think you meant COBOL. Compared to the millions of lines of code of the financial systems at IBM, then no, but at 80 large is now measured in a few hundreds so yes I could use that ability to speed up my comprehension and the IDE 2 does implement it at not only the procedure/function level, but also the logic level and as I just last night discovered the #if and #ifdef as well (see pics before and after)

After what I learned last night and this morning, I am now a big (not quite huge yet) fan of IDE 2, thanks for continuing to push my stubborn friend @frogandtoad, you are not often wrong, but this time you are right. (<--- gotcha)

@zander

Posted by: @zander

@frogandtoad I think you meant COBOL. Compared to the millions of lines of code of the financial systems at IBM, then no, but at 80 large is now measured in a few hundreds so yes I could use that ability to speed up my comprehension and the IDE 2 does implement it at not only the procedure/function level, but also the logic level and as I just last night discovered the #if and #ifdef as well (see pics before and after)

After what I learned last night and this morning, I am now a big (not quite huge yet) fan of IDE 2, thanks for continuing to push my stubborn friend @frogandtoad, you are not often wrong, but this time you are right. (<--- gotcha)

 

I think you meant COBOL

Yes, my bad - I was trying to type COBALT hehe.

Me? Wrong? always! Me right? Always, yeah, nah! 😉

Cheers