Thursday, November 27, 2008

The Quest for Paladin Continues

...and I'm having a blast each step of the way. I wish code hackery were always this fun. In fact, I have to remind myself of the consequences of not taking breaks even though I'm in the zone and don't really want to. Haven't hurt myself yet. :-) I'm also thankful this season for the rest of my family having caught colds nasty enough to keep us home that aren't so bad as to make life at home miserable. Why? Some much-needed rest and relaxation. I've even had some time to catch up on some projects around the house in addition to spending time with my family, whipping up Thanksgiving dinner, and working hard on my future first choice of development tools, the real reason for this post.

I'm happy to say that Paladin has reached alpha -- it's now feature-complete. While I know of a few bugs that I found shortly before I stopped for the day, I bet there are more yet to be discovered and fixed before I'm comfy with releasing the official Beta 1. I'll be eating my own cat food (dog food? No thanks...) on this one, so it may be a bit, knowing my perfectionist tendencies. It should be well worth all the trouble, and the closer it gets to actual usefulness as a tool, the more excited I get. I'll be able to get rid of BeIDE's annoyances, and the community at large will have a free-as-in-freedom development environment. Who knows? Maybe the guys back at Haiku might even find it worthwhile to have as one of those tools included in the pre-alpha builds. I won't push for it or anything, but that'd be the icing on the cake.

4 comments:

  1. Nice work, I havn't tested paladin but I uses BeIDE and Pe every day when programmin in Zeta/BeOS/ Haiku. How far will Paladin be made like BeIDE? same plugin system? Perhaps Paladin should be able to use external editor like BeIDE can that way it can use Pe without changes?

    ReplyDelete
  2. As far as plugins go, I was planning on keeping Pe's system for the editor and making a plugin system to add more file types to the build. IIRC BeIDE's plugin system had one type for the editor and another for the Project Settings window. I *think* Pe can load BeIDE plugins in addition to its own, but I'll have to do some investigating on that one.

    Anyway, I never liked using Pe with BeIDE because I'd already gotten used to all of BeIDE's shortcuts (Alt-M for build, etc.) and I hate having to customize yet another set of keybindings instead of just having some sensible defaults on both sides that work well. It would be pretty easy to support external editors. Just curious, what would make you want to use one, though?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know but some action you can do from Pe, not Alt-R (or -k) but Alt-M (although I use ctrl+M) think there are other but only those that are "public" commands in BeIDE can be used from Pe, I like the class recognition (the known class turns green if correct), I have also turned of the "white window" that always shows up.

    Pe does have a lot of things missing but at least for me I will miss the project window of BeIDE more than the BeIDE editor, as I can manage with Pe but something like Visual Studio 2008 would be cool :)

    Will there be a public svn or similar?

    ReplyDelete
  4. If anyone has a desire to help, yes, but if not, I'll just be making the sources available alongside the binaries. No one has mentioned anything to me as far as I can remember, so not yet, anyway.

    ReplyDelete