Sublime Text AMX NetLinx Plugin

sublime-netlinx

This is a plugin for developers looking for a lighter weight alternative to
NetLinx Studio, while still providing powerful functionality. On top of the
features provided by Sublime Text, this plugin
adds syntax highlighting, color schemes, and build support for the AMX NetLinx
programming language. This is also a great option for programmers who are
looking to use one editor for multiple languages.

Designed for Sublime Text 3

Installation

1. Install Sublime Package Control
2. Open the Command Palette (Ctrl + Shift + P)
3. Select Package Control: Install Package
4. Select NetLinx

NetLinx Classic Color Scheme

Sublime will use the editor's global color scheme by default. If you would like
the files to look the way they do in NetLinx Studio, the sublime-netlinx package
comes with a classic NetLinx color scheme.

• Enable NetLinx Classic Color Scheme

Build Support

Build support requires the NetLinx Compile
utility to be installed, as well as the NetLinx compiler provided by AMX. The
AMX NetLinx compiler is bundled with NetLinx Studio.

File Transfer

File transfer is handled by FileTransfer 2,
provided by AMX via the Web Update utility or as a download from the prior link.

Issues, Bugs, Feature Requests

Any bugs and feature requests should be reported on the GitHub issue tracker:

https://github.com/amclain/sublime-netlinx/issues

Pull requests are preferred via GitHub.

Mercurial users can use Hg-Git to interact with
GitHub repositories.

Transitioning From NetLinx Studio

It is important to understand that sublime-netlinx is an alternative way to
work with NetLinx files, not a feature-for-feature clone of NetLinx Studio.
Therefore, sublime-netlinx requires a different way of thinking than what
you may be used to. If you typically work with multiple programming languages,
transitioning to sublime-netlinx will probably be easy and increase your
productivity. If NetLinx is your only programming language, the transition may
be more difficult. If you've spent a reasonable amount of time with
sublime-netlinx and find yourself frustrated, sublime-netlinx may not be right
for you. That's ok.

Workflow

Sublime Text does a good job of providing an interface that is far less
cluttered than the NetLinx Studio IDE. In Sublime you'll spend a lot of time
using the command palette (ctrl + shift + p). Due to this, the sublime-netlinx
commands are available from the command palette with the prefix NetLinx.

Since sublime-netlinx is designed to be lightweight, work is delegated to
Sublime Text commands and external applications. For example, although building
a NetLinx file appears to happen in Sublime Text, it's only the console output
of netlinx-compile that's
displayed by Sublime Text. The build command delegates the work to
netlinx-compile, which runs in the background.

Some of AMX's proprietary applications don't provide interfaces to work with
their data and can only be used as standalone applications. NetLinx Diagnostics
is an example of this. sublime-netlinx provides convenience commands to launch
these applications.

Sublime Text is a very versatile editor. Keep in mind that you can customize
the editor and add plugins to further improve your
workflow.

Setting Up A Workspace

The easiest way to maintain a NetLinx workspace with Sublime Text is by
using a netlinx-workspace workspace.config.yaml file.
This file can be created by hand, by running netlinx-workspace --create, or by
using a framework like netlinx-erb
that handles all aspects of developing and maintaining a NetLinx project.

Ideally a project using a workspace.config.yaml file will be able to be
compiled with a standard Sublime build task (ctrl + b). However, the
extension discovery system issue
needs to be resolved before this works. In the mean time, a NetLinx Studio .apw
file can be generated from the command palette with
NetLinx: Generate .apw From workspace.config.yaml. The netlinx-erb framework
isn't affected by this problem, as it uses its own set of automated tasks.

• Alternate Method Using NetLinx Studio

Command Reference

This plugin provides commands that are accessible from the Sublime Text Command
Palette (Tools -> Command Palette) (Ctrl + Shift + P).

• Build: Build (Ctrl + B) - Same as Build: Workspace
• Build: Source
• Build: Workspace - All Systems
• Build: Workspace - Active System
• Build: Run (Future)
• NetLinx: Fix Indentation
• NetLinx: New From Template: Standard
• NetLinx: New From Template: Include
• NetLinx: New From Template: Test Suite
• NetLinx: New From Template: Overview
• NetLinx: Launch File Transfer
• NetLinx: Launch NetLinx Diagnostics

Snippets

All of the code snippets available for auto-completion can be found under the menu:

Tools -> Snippets...

Helpful Sublime Plugins

Sublime Text plugins can be installed using Package Control.

• Abacus - Text alignment.
• All Autocomplete -
  Extends the default autocomplete to find matches in all open files.
• HexViewer - Hex viewer/editor.
• Text Pastry - Insert number/text sequences.
• Vintageous - Vim hotkeys.