Thread: IDEs: I want non uniform fonts!

  1. #1
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    IDEs: I want non uniform fonts!

    Ok. So how many of you would love for the ability to have different fonts being supported on the same IDE source code window? I know I would.

    I comment a lot. And I mean a lot!
    Not because I'm a comment freak. But because I'm a documenting freak. So while I don't comment my code except where I feel necessary, I document every single class and member along with their respective arguments and everything else I deem necessary (structs, enums, constants, globals, namespaces). But have you tried following code that has more lines documenting it than it has actual code?

    So, I'm forced into always keep a branch of my code that is nothing more than a xerox copy of the trunk where I do all the documenting to later be generated by the appropriate tools (god forbid one day me needing a real branch!). This is true for C++ and Doxygen and is also becoming true for C# and SandCastle. If I didn't do that it would be either no documentation or loss of ability to read and maintain my code among the comment lines.

    I do my best. I always set my IDE comments colors to be nearly transparent and to blend into the background so they stay away from the rest of the code. But it's just not good enough.

    What I would always felt was the need for the IDEs to support different font sizes and types based on context. Simply, to add the ability to change the font when setting up our color coding schemes. And I would really love for IDEs to once and for all also acknowledge comments as part of their feature-rich environments. That is, the ability to auto-collapse comments, hide comments, support external files commenting, whatever.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  2. #2
    Woof, woof! zacs7's Avatar
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    Time for you to switch to vim

    vim does most of what you spoke of.
    Last edited by zacs7; 12-08-2009 at 11:45 PM.

  3. #3
    C++ Witch laserlight's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F.
    What I would always felt was the need for the IDEs to support different font sizes and types based on context. Simply, to add the ability to change the font when setting up our color coding schemes. And I would really love for IDEs to once and for all also acknowledge comments as part of their feature-rich environments. That is, the ability to auto-collapse comments, hide comments, support external files commenting, whatever.
    I had the impression that many of them already support such features. What IDE are you using?
    Quote Originally Posted by Bjarne Stroustrup (2000-10-14)
    I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.
    Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

  4. #4
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by laserlight View Post
    I had the impression that many of them already support such features. What IDE are you using?
    Visual Studio mostly. Despite my love for it, I'm only using SlickEdit now when compiling with MinGW.

    They don't laserlight. Well, you do have code collapsing. This feature, while useful is a tad bit annoying. For one there are no individual settings. I cannot for instance say to fold/unfold only comments. SlickEdit gives me this option through its integrated scripting language. Visual Studio may give it to me through its add-in framework.

    As for font settings, I'm not sure any of them support this in any way. What have you been hearing?

    Neither they support hiding/unhiding content, or current documenting practices account for anything other than documenting source code directly, something I find rather odd. It seems just so much more natural to me that code documenting was done outside the source code.

    Quote Originally Posted by Zacs7
    Time for you to switch to vim
    It's too late for vim now. I'm too wrapped up in the IDE culture to go back to CLI editors.

    Productively, it is also a step back on a windows environment. Vim would only serve me for the MinGW compiler. And there I have the excelent SlickEdit. With Visual Studio C++ or C# programming, vim would demand a big effort to set up an acceptable working environment. This would be a mistake since my only annoyance with current IDEs is their lack of code comment-related features.

    Does vim support different font types and sizes on the same opened document? Didn't know it did.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  5. #5
    C++ Witch laserlight's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F.
    As for font settings, I'm not sure any of them support this in any way. What have you been hearing?
    I know that Notepad++, a "mere" editor, supports fine granularity for font settings because their default comment font peeved me for a long time

    I happened to be on a university computer with several IDEs installed at the time of my previous reply, and a quick check showed that Netbeans 6 from some minor versions back has such support as well. I could not figure out if Eclipse 3.5 has such support, despite its wide ranging (and somewhat bewildering) configuration options, but it does support comment folding/collapsing like Visual Studio 2008 (which you acknowledged) and Geany, a lightweight IDE that I use as a text editor, but with better fine tuning of the details of that feature than the latter two.

    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F.
    Neither they support hiding/unhiding content
    What do you mean by this?
    Quote Originally Posted by Bjarne Stroustrup (2000-10-14)
    I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.
    Look up a C++ Reference and learn How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

  6. #6
    l'Anziano DavidP's Avatar
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    For Visual Studio, you could try searching the Visual Studio Gallery, which contains quite a few plug-ins.

    A quick search found these:

    ItalicComments

    VSdocman

    SlickEdit Tools for Visual Studio

    What version of Visual Studio are you using? If you use XML comments on all your functions and classes, Visual Studio supports collapsing of those (but not the other features you are looking for, of course).
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    Unregistered User Yarin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by laserlight View Post
    What do you mean by this?
    Collapsible blocks, I think.

    Have you tried Code::Blocks? It's a decent IDE, that supports MSVC++ and MinGW.
    It has the collapse feature, but doesn't support multiple fonts.

  8. #8
    The Right Honourable psychopath's Avatar
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    XCode has a feature that allows you to manually collapse selected text. It's not as nice as automatic recognition, but maybe there's something similar buried in VS somewhere?
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  9. #9
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by laserlight View Post
    I know that Notepad++, a "mere" editor, supports fine granularity for font settings because their default comment font peeved me for a long time
    That's good. But really doesn't address the IDE issue

    I happened to be on a university computer with several IDEs installed at the time of my previous reply, and a quick check showed that Netbeans 6 from some minor versions back has such support as well.
    That's better news. I'll hope similar functionality gets introduced on Visual Studio. This IDE has been my source of criticism for too long despite using it almost exclusively for the past 1.5 years.

    What do you mean by this?
    Actually hiding code. Not folding, but making it simply disappear or reappear. Necessarily it makes no sense for normal lines of code. But it makes all sense for those XML documenting lines in my source files. "Hide XMLDoc" / "Show XMLDoc".

    Quote Originally Posted by DavidP View Post
    For Visual Studio, you could try searching the Visual Studio Gallery, which contains quite a few plug-ins.

    A quick search found these:

    ItalicComments

    VSdocman

    SlickEdit Tools for Visual Studio
    Been there, done that
    None of these tools really address comment-centric features that actually make sense. ItalicComments is the best of the bunch since it gets the idea. But italicizing comments is not enough. Changing their font type and size would be grand, though.

    What version of Visual Studio are you using? If you use XML comments on all your functions and classes, Visual Studio supports collapsing of those (but not the other features you are looking for, of course).
    As I said, Code Collapsing is an underdeveloped feature on Visual Studio (and many other IDEs). It's either all or nothing. If you need to fine tune your view of the code you will then need to manually collapse/expand each node. Not only that, but you also don't have a guarantee your current view will remain across Visual Studio sessions. It will for this session even if you close the file. But if you close Visual Studio the settings will be lost.

    Instead, options like "Collapse XMLdoc" and "Expand XMLDoc" would be a nice addition.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yarin View Post
    Have you tried Code::Blocks? It's a decent IDE, that supports MSVC++ and MinGW.
    It has the collapse feature, but doesn't support multiple fonts.
    Gosh, I wish you didn't do that.
    And exactly what have I been talking about? Hmm?
    Last edited by Mario F.; 12-09-2009 at 03:24 PM.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  10. #10
    Woof, woof! zacs7's Avatar
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    I agree, although it's not something I do with vim. Even though non-monospace fonts are so much easier on the eyes. I simply add extra lines to comments I want to collapse (like copyright), and add a vim header to the file. i.e.:

    Attachment 9505

    Where the file source is:
    Code:
    /* vim: set ff=unix nowrap fdm=marker tabstop=3 shiftwidth=3 softtabstop=3 expandtab:
    
       snako copyright {{{
    
       Snako
          By zacs7
          Copyright 2009, All rights reserved
    
          Licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 licence
          See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/au/ or LICENCE
    
       }}}
    */
    
    package snako;
    
    /**
       Main entry point for the Snako application.
       This class is responsible for creating and initialising the 
    ...
    I'm telling you now, you're missing out . I have vim setup like an IDE... so it is an IDE really.

  11. #11
    Unregistered User Yarin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mario F. View Post
    And exactly what have I been talking about? Hmm?
    Right, I see; sorry.

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    Quote Originally Posted by laserlight View Post
    I know that Notepad++, a "mere" editor, supports fine granularity for font settings because their default comment font peeved me for a long time
    I was about to suggest Notepad++.

    Attachment 9506

    I also like the ability to double click a word and have it highlighted everywhere in the source. You'll only know that you need something like that after you've tried it, but it's really great.
    main() { int O[!0<<~-!0]; (!0<<!0)[O]+= ~0 +~(!0|!0<<!0); printf("a function calling "); }

  13. #13
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Absolutely. Now, doesn't that comment line in Notepad++ makes all the difference? Damn sure it does! The code reads so much better.

    I also like the ability to double click a word and have it highlighted everywhere in the source. You'll only know that you need something like that after you've tried it, but it's really great.
    I got that at work trough Devexpress CodeRush. That a few other niceties. CodeRush's a beast. I never used notepad for code editing. I have for this many years and didn't even know it could do that. It's a notepad replacement for me. And I'm afraid it will keep being one.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  14. #14
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Ah. At some point I actually thought no village idiot would come and visit this thread. But here it is, Mr. I Say Really Stupid Things That I Think Are Very Smart.

    Son, if I wanted to code an IDE, XMLDoc implementation would be at the very bottom of my priorities. Your naivety in thinking you are talking to idiots like yourself is only possible because of your ignorance.
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  15. #15
    Registered User jeffcobb's Avatar
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    Are you *sure* Slick doesn't do what you want? As of version 11 or so, at least the Linux version I seem to recall being able to set each different type of code (comments, etc) to a different font/color/size...
    C/C++ Environment: GNU CC/Emacs
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