Chris wrote:
The ijx and ijs windows are read and written on request, and do not continually check whether they have been updated by an external process. This practice is common in Windows text editors, but whether J should do so is debatable - it involves a lot of mechanism that is probably more trouble than it is worth. It is easiest just to avoid editing a script in J and in an external editor at the same time.
Sort of makes it difficult to create an alternative IDE w/o that support. As i said earlier i have been i need of a mechanism for maintaining my state independently of J's stability - hence the alternate open window.
Project files are normal script files loaded with 0!:0, and do not interpret NB. comment lines. They are intended to be read and written by the Project Manager. In normal use, you need not modify them directly, and if you are doing so, you are likely missing some feature in Project Manager that will do it for you.
If you do modify them outside Project Manager, take care to preserve
their format. It looks like you changed it somehow. Hmm, guess i need to figure out how to get PM to modify them then ... perils of bootstrapping to understanding;-) Thanks for the guidance.
If a project is opened in Project Manager, it is not going to continually re-read the project, just in case an external program has changed it - in this case, exit Project Manager, make your changes, then reload it.
OK
greg heil wrote:
> Then there is the oddity that if i do a File | Refresh Tabs (while in Project or Other tabs) in the Project Manager and then go to either the Project or Other tabs and click on a Files item ... the highlighted item reflects a file in the Source tab not what it should be for that tab...
Is this on Windows or Linux? I have not seen any problems on Windows, but have occasionally noticed Project Manager tabs not being refreshed properly under Linux. I think this happens when a tab is empty, and will try to track this down for the release.
W2K AS The tabs are not (necessarily) empty clicking on an item line replaces its content with the corresponding item line in Source.
> i have had to shut the Project Manager down and restart it when it somehow lost the life project file. Have not been able to replicate that condition as yet. Seems again to be related to a caching action where it gets in a "state" which is other than what is reflected in the gui.
I don't understand this. PM should not lose a project file - though in normal use you can be prompted whether to save changes, and perhaps this was not done.
i don't think i have ever been "prompted" in PM. i have received messages about the non existence of files etc, ie error messages, but no prompt dialogs.
One change I could make is to always save changes immediately, rather than prompting for them. As long as you are backing up properly, and in particular using the snapshot feature, then saving changes immediately should not be a problem. Any thoughts on this?
Probably beyond my sophistication. Don't know about the snapshot procedure yet. i am just trying to understand how the basic Life project works... and stumbling. But i gather i need to exit the PM whenever i change any file. This does seem awkward and i had sort of thought its File | Refresh Tabs did the equivalent of that - like a "Revert" item in the File menu of a text editor: makes sure everything is in sync with what is on the disk. That might be a good middle way:-) ~greg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
