I think close coupling of debug and edit are a fantastic direction to work. But of course if it was as easy as bolting Scintilla on to Firebug it would already be done. (I've heard rumors of work on a new JS-based editor from Mozilla Labs that is supposed to be out in January).
As I point out below, I don't think you can get both live edits and source edits easily. In my own work I am concentrating on a much deeper integration between editor and debugger, an integration that does not allow the use of normal source files. This would make all edits 'live' much like the Smalltalk or Self environments work. But will developers agree to use something that does not use standard source files? More below: On Dec 30, 1:56 am, AjitK <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > I am thinking of embedding a text editor in Firebug. I searched around > if somebody has already done or people actually need it? There were a > few queries regarding it but was never taken forward as an embedded > editor. I think, it provides APIs for integration with external text > editors though. I did not find a free and lightweight editor with it. > I have heard about Aptana but did not like it due to it "heaviness" > and having to load and run Eclipse everytime I needed to edit a > script. If you tried Aptana you'd find out that it does not work by loading every time you need to edit a script. Rather Aptana stays up and communicates with Firebug. > > Right now, in-place editing DOM/CSS/JS ("LiveCoder" extension for JS) > can be done through text boxes. This is ok to get the work done but > may not be very easy (and intuitive?). It would be great if the > editor, if linked to the actual file (on local filesystem or using > WebDav/sftp/ftp), is able to save the contents to the actual file. > "Live editing" makes much more sense from the perspective of an IDE. I don't see how this makes sense. Either you are live editing or you are editing local files. Which is it? If you save the live contents to a file then its not source. That is the direction I want to try, but you have to be prepared for people rejecting the idea. > > Some benefits that I see for an embedded editor are: > * Easy to edit and apply changes > * Natural environment to edit text, related to above > * Ability to save file contents to the physical file. As I said, live editing and file editing are mutually exclusive for the most part. You either have to pick one or you have to figure out how to map live edits to source edits. I think there are lots of fun experiments to try. > * Firebug getting close to being an IDE for web development. (Is it > too much to ask from Firebug) > * Reduces development time by cutting down editing time with in-place > editing. We dont loose data. We dont have to switch tabs to edit > relevant source files. I don't get the switch tabs part here. But in general the organization of screen real estate is critical. > * A speculation: Possibly faster load times of text in an editor > buffer for large JS library files. Hmmm, you said you were going to save the files (I guess to local storage?) So you have to load them again correct? > > Does this make sense to you? What is the best choice for embedding > one? Scintilla looks like a very solid candidate. It is being used in > Notepad++ and Komodo Edit. Give it a go and let us know. Anything you learn will be helpful. > > Ajit --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Firebug" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/firebug?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
