untidy blogsimon steele writes about stuff…

A little while back I asked people a couple of questions to help guide future PN development.

The results ended up looking like this:

Is the fact that you can float PN document windows useful?

This question is concerned with whether the MDI window management system is helpful to people. I suspected that most users had windows maximised all the time and used the tabs to switch – i.e. MDI wasn’t buying them much. Here are the results:

18% of people were using the abilities of MDI windows and were very happy about them. Pretty much everyone else doesn’t care or would rather be able to split the view.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to drive any instant knee-jerk changes, but I’m keeping it in mind for future design work. I am definitely going to address the lack of split views, I’m just trying to decide how.

Do you use the individual output windows?

Here I wondered whether the hidden away option to use individual output windows instead of the global one for each window was actually being used – I suspected not. I was wrong!

Lots of people use the individual output windows, and it appears lots of people have no idea what output windows are! I’m not sure whether this is because they have no need in their editing for tools and output, or are just unaware of the features.

I’ll be posting some more questions soon, and wanted to thank everyone who took the time to answer these polls or comment – it’s appreciated!

This is a minor bugfix testing release for Programmer’s Notepad, fixing a few niggles with the last release.

Downloads

• 0.9.926 Installer
• 0.9.926 Portable

There is also a new PyPN release fixing a couple of issues with the included scripts from the last build:

• PyPN 0.11.926 for Python 2.4
• PyPN 0.11.926 for Python 2.5
• PyPN 0.11.926 for Python 2.6

Thanks to all the users who have put time and effort into reporting and following up on bugs, testing, and contributing patches.

This is the second post in the Writing your First Extension series. You can see the full article here: Writing Your First Extension.

Menu items are added via the IPN object provided at extension load time. You add menu items by providing an implementation of IMenuItems. Here is a very simple implementation supporting a single item:

class Menu : public extensions::IMenuItems
{
public:
    Menu()
    {
        memset(&item1, 0, sizeof(item1));
        item1.Handler = &MyExtensionFunc;
        item1.Title = L"Hello World";
        // item1.Type = extensions::miItem;
        // item1.UserData = 0;
    }

    /**
     * Get the number of MenuItem instances that can be retrieved.
     */
    virtual int GetItemCount() const
    {
        return 1;
    }

    /**
     * Get an individual MenuItem instance by index.
     */
    virtual extensions::MenuItem& GetItem(int index) const
    {
        if (index == 0)
            return const_cast<extensions ::menuitem&>(item1);
    }

private:
    extensions::MenuItem item1;
};

This very simple implementation adds a single menu item called "Hello World". When the item is selected, the MyExtensionFunc method will be executed by PN.

It might seem like a fair bit of code to add a menu item, but in the next SDK version I’ll provide a general-purpose helper to make this easy. The reason for the interface is to make it easy for you to provide sub-menus. MenuItem instances can contain child items by changing Type to miSubItem and filling in the SubItems member with another instance implementing IMenuItems.

The handler method looks like this:

void MyExtensionFunc(extensions::cookie_t /*cookie*/)
{
    g_PN->GetGlobalOutputWindow()->AddToolOutput("Hello World!");
    g_PN->ShowOutput();
}

Once you have your handler and IMenuItems implementation, you just need to tell PN about your items. In your init function you need something like this:

bool __stdcall pn_init_extension(int iface_version, extensions::IPN* pn)
{
    if(iface_version != PN_EXT_IFACE_VERSION)
        return false;

    g_PN = pn;

    Menu menu;
    pn->AddPluginMenuItems(&menu);

    return true;
}

Now you have Programmer’s Notepad presenting your commands in the menu and can handle their selection. Next time we’ll look at the other events PN lets you attach to.

The latest testing release of Programmer’s Notepad 2 is out, fixing a couple of annoying bugs in the previous release amongst other things. This release is also the first in-the-wild use of the “check for updates” feature. If you are running build 853 or newer and have enabled looking for testing updates, then in the next day or so PN will notify you that there is a new version available.

Changes in this build:

1. Wombat preset included
2. Ignore ctags warnings when parsing tags
3. Fixed bug causing tools capture not to work properly
4. Allow changing display name of root magic folder
5. Add support for displaying the caret as a block
6. Switch back to a DLL for Scintilla for those that use a custom build

Note that if you intend to use a custom build of Scintilla (SciLexer.dll) to support other schemes or prototype changes then you will need to build using the project in the PN source or you will lose the new Regular Expression support. To get the source and build the project you might like to look at How To Compile PN on the docs site.

There were problems with the pnotepad.org host not sending on e-mail, so registrations for the forums and comment notifications were not being sent. This is all fixed now, so if you were trying to register please try again!