I do a fair bit of Custom Tool development in Pascal using the Optuma Tool Programming (Beta) (herein the “Editor”) which, regrettably, is rather limited in its functionality and this becomes painful when developing tools of more than 100 or so lines in length. Some things I’d like to see improved are:
The ability to collapse procedures that are not being edited and are known to be working correctly.
Along the top or bottom of the Editor windows, character position numbers with faint vertical lines every 20 characters over the code to make it easier to find compile errors that give a character position.
Have the Editor remember its screen position, size and location of cursor when closed and reopened.
A filter that stops it deleting all code from the Editor if an invalid character (like the degree symbol °) is entered in the code or comments.
As I've recently been exploring coding using the Ephemeris and all its angles in Custom Tools, the desire to use the ° symbol is almost impossible to avoid. (I know for displaying results I can use CHR(176) in strings.) It took me a long time to find that inserting ° in my code or comments caused the loss of all my work - a real pain in code of over a couple of hundred lines. From my testing, the Editor crashes if any character higher than ASCII 126 is within the code. So, fixing item 4 above is for me, a high priority.
There are many other improvements that would be desirable, but these to me are the essential ones. As an alternative, would it be possible to integrate a freely available more functional editor, such as the open source Lazarus Free Pascal RAD IDE.
Let us have a look into these. I highly doubt anything will be done for 1.6 as that has already entered testing and we are dealing with minor fixes for that.
I think the best idea is to use a different IDE like VSCode. We’ll need to investigate that.
The hard part for me is allocating resources to it because there are other areas that affect many more clients which we need to work on. I would dearly love to be able to do all things at the same time but I do have to priotitise. All I can promise right now is that I will look into it but what gets done will depend on how difficult it is.
I hope you can improve it in 1.7. A better IDE might also encourage others to do a bit of Pascal programming for themselves with some of their more esoteric ideas.
Put your hands up for Programming IDE improvement fellow “Pascallers”.