For the curious onlookers, the next release of Padre (0.21) should be an excellent candidate for your inspection.
Since my last recommended release (0.14) we've taken large strides forwards. Padre is now FAR superior to Windows notepad, and we're starting to get close to having the family of Windows-based "programmers editors" (Ultraedit, Notepad++, etc) come into our sights now.
For starters, the development team has somewhere between doubled and tripled in the last 5 weeks.
As far as new features, we've added the following.
- A shiny new Plugin API which supports enable/disable, upgrading, compatibility detection, document type registration, and high-quality menus with context refresh support.
- "My Plugin" support, making it trivial to start hacking on your own plugins.
- Better support for PAR Padre and PAR Plugins
- A far more robust document model.
- Document type-aware menu options, so "Comment these lines" does the right thing on different document types (at least theoretically).
- Code folding support.
- Auto-indent support in 3 different flavours.
- Show/Hide for tabs, newlines and other white space.
- Word wrapping support.
- Tab to Space conversion support.
- Internationalisation support, with translations to French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Korean and Russian. The default language is now English (The Queen's). Support for English (American) has not yet been contributed.
- GUI upgrade to the prettier AUI panes.
- perl -c syntax checking
- Option to highlight the current line in high-visibility day-glow yellow.
- Drag and drop files onto Padre to open them.
- Full Screen support (not maximize, actual fullscreen)
- Background-detection of open files changing on disk.
- Printing support.
- Snippit insertion support.
- Threaded backgrounding analysis support.
For only 5 weeks difference, this is a monumental amount of functionality to add.
As you can imagine, this pace means some of the new functionality is a little fragile, but features do seem to be stabilising within a month or two after they first appear.
For example, startup, shutdown, save all, close all and so on actions are now much much crisper. They've been tweaked out extensively with GUI do-not-render hints and other hints to show windows late, and destroy windows early.
As a result, Padre now FEELS a LOT faster and crisper than 5 or 6 releases ago.
Still to do, alas, Project support, but that's next on the hit list.
But 0.21 should be a great "next look", I highly recommend it.
P.S. That was not The Other Sekrit. :)
Is there an "open" comparison table of "perl-oriented features only" (compatibility of debuggerS, coverage, execute scripts, error location highlighting) in Padre versus EPIC/Eclipse and other free as in beer IDE?
Re: Padre
gabor on 2008-12-10T14:05:25
I don't know what do you mean by "open". Padre has its own table of features that is based on the Perl Development Tools table in Perlmonks.If you have other measurements, you might start such a table on the Perl 5 wiki
We definitely would like to have tickets opened on features missing from Padre.
Re: Padre
mw487 on 2008-12-10T22:37:46
That table at perlmonks is very nice.
I did not see perlipse http://perlipse.blogspot.com/ , a quibble with them not you.
By "open" I meant wiki-ish, updated by many authors as versions improve.
I like the perldoc access in eclipse + epic, a nice model.
Re: Padre
Ron Savage on 2008-12-10T23:17:00
Are you really approaching a point where comparison with UltraEdit is realistic?
I'm astonished, because I used UltraEdit for years before switching to Debian and hence to Emacs, and know just how good UE is.
Well done!
PS: This is not a reply to a reply, but to the original post. However I cannot see how to do that
:-(. Re: Padre
Alias on 2008-12-10T23:58:19
As an Ultraedit user myself, I'm not ready to switch yet.
We're certainly not at parity yet, but we're reaching the point where the idea of taking them on is starting to look pretty realistic.
There's going to be a list of features that people NEED in order to switch.
For me, that list is down to only Find/Replace in Files and unified editor support (all calls to start an editor turn into open calls to the current editor).
Most of the rest we have, or aren't that important.
That said, we're nowhere near as configurable as something like Ultraedit, the amount of work needed to do pretty dialogs and such is not attracting much in the way of contributions.
But I assume that once the core editor is stabilising we'll see more work done on the dialogs.
