Re: [Pipmak-Devel] Build 170: First impression..

[Christian W. <cwa...@gm...>]

Andrea Viarengo wrote:
> There are still a little bug, when you inspect a table contained in 
> another table, you cannot return to the first table pressing the arrow 
> at top of the window, and you get the error:
> 
> Error running onmouseup handle of handle 3:
> error in error handler

Works for me, unless I'm misunderstanding you. Can you describe the 
exact steps you use to reproduce this?

> An interesting hidden features:  if you write  "_G" in Command Line you 
> get the list of all Global variable defined....

I wouldn't call this "hidden", it's plainly documented in the Lua 
reference manual...

> Some ideas on evolution of table inspector:
> 
> 1) Click on a line in the table inspector, should write the 
> variable/function/table name in the command line, for further analisys,
> for example, I inspect the table "pipmak", click on line containing 
> "gotonode", and I get  "pipmak.gotonode("   in the command line...
> a useful shortcut for lazy people....

Good idea. I have briefly though of this, but haven't followed it any 
further because it's not that simple - given just a table (like the 
pipmak table in the pipmak.gotonode example), you can't derive an 
expression that results in it (i.e. "pipmak" in this example). The 
command line and table inspector would have to work together to keep 
track of how you arrived at the current table.

> 2)  Resizable columns  in the table  inspector  (long name are truncated)

Or, more fundamentally, resizable panels. The command line panel should 
be resizable too.

> 3)  Taking into consideration a tree structure for sub-table inspecting, 

Personally, I like the column view better than the tree view for this 
application, so that's basically what I've implemented (just that only 
the rightmost column is visible at any time).

> and/or possibility to open subtable in another window.

At the moment that's not possible because nodes are designed as 
singletons. We'll see whether it makes sense to revise that decision.

> 4)  What you think about integration of my menu.lua in your gui.lua? (I 
> added submenus and long menu manager to my last version)

Well, at the moment there just are no menus in the Pipmak user 
interface, so the question is moot. If and when they appear, I'll 
consider it, so thanks for the offer.

> Just a curiosity: do you think to add an embedded lua editor in pipmak 
> (maybe with step by step debug), using texteditor functionalities?

No. First, because implementing a full text editor is a lot of work 
(implementing the current text edit fields was enough already, and 
they're still not complete), and I don't see a lot of value in it. Even 
the debugger is probably best implemented as a separate application that 
has access to the platform's full set of user interface components (I 
don't know if there's an existing remote debugging solution for Lua 
(like Winpdb for Python), but even writing our own would probably be 
easier (and more useful) than doing it inside Pipmak with its limited 
capabilities). Second, I don't think users would be happy with a text 
editor that doesn't follow their platform's conventions. I'm hoping to 
get away with that for the few single-line text fields, but even they 
probably already have a distinct Mac-like feel to them.

> But what about different rendering of not-trasparent and trasparent PNG 
> (see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.games.devel.pipmak.devel/76 )?

That's the next thing on my to-do list.

  -Christian