#12 Version 7 wishlist: IDE

[vlad]

This is ticket 2 of 2 of my CLIPS wishlist. First is :
https://sourceforge.net/p/clipsrules/feature-requests/11/

This one pertains to the CLIPS IDE

Mr Gary, thank you for all the work you've done throughout the years,
and also for the work you continue to do.

Regards,

• a fan

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CLIPSIDE

#1. When running inside the CLIPSIDE repl, please add a function to manipulate some aspects of the IDE. I'm specially hoping for:
(ide clear-scrollback)

#2. When running inside the IDE, please add a shortcut (like F5) to rerun the last batch file used.
This would allow a nice flow when iterating:

    - make CLIPS changes in external editor (like vscode)
    - switch back to IDE and press F5 to test changes
    - repeat

This, coupled with the ability to clear scrollback from a script, would be sweet!

#3. Needs fix: in the IDE, when at the 'CLIPS>' prompt, pressing 'home' key doesn't nagivate the caret to beginning of line.

#4. Possibly big change. On behalf of my retinas, please add a dark theme to the IDE, if possible.

#5. Please add a toggleable option, in a menu, to auto-add top-level parenthesis.
That is, if the option is on, then entering this:
CLIPS> watch rules
would be equivalent to this:
CLIPS> (watch rules)

The behavior of that feature would be simple: If the first non-whitespace character of the text-buffer
is a letter or underscore "_", then add a "(" at the beginning, and a ")" at the end of
the text-buffer.

This is not a huge deal, but it would make working at the repl just a tiny bit nicer.

#6. Currently, at the IDE prompt, when pressing up/down keys, it always navigates the history.
This causes an issue when editing multi-line code: it's not possible to navigate
to the previous and next line with the up/down arrows.
I think it's important to be able to do that.
The way Powershell handles it is that if the user is editing a multi-line command,
then the up/down arrows does not change history -- they navigate, instead.
This could be detected by searching for a '\n' newline in the text-buffer when
an up/down arrow is pressed.

#7. Allow Ctrl+Enter (or Shift+Enter) to execute the current prompt buffer, regardless of the position of the cursor. Currently, one is forced to navigate to the end of the text-buffer, then press enter, to execute the code.

[Gary Riley]

1) There's already a function called clear-window that you can enter to clear the scrollback.
4) My vision changed in the last few years and I switched over to dark mode with apps that supported it. The macOS IDE supports dark mode. All it required was a recompile of the source code with the newer SDK and there was a single custom widget that needed to be swapped out with the appropriate system widget. I spent a week or so trying to get dark mode working with the Windows IDE. It was a nightmare with no reasonable support options for WPF .NET apps.