ML tk Text Editor

Some features

• Basic tcl syntax highlighting
• Procedure window, select a procedure to go directly to it
• Right click on a word to have the word "copied" to the "find" window
• Multiple windows open simultaneously
• The editor can be invoked with file names on the command line, including wildcards (don't do too many)
• The replace function
• Undo/redo (RA2 but strangely "no select all"
• Brace matching - highlight matching braces when cursor is on a brace (also quotes & square brackets)
• Goto line number (control-g or "view" menu)
• Added "font larger/smaller" to the view menu; 20th June 02 (v1.09)
• Changed window system so only opens 1 toplevel window, uses frames & packing for window/file selection
• Added a splash screen on startup to show "loading file ..." (v1.10)
• Added a "search - grep" function
• Don't syntax highlight files at startup, do when they are first viewed
• The most recent find/replace strings weren't being stored at the start of the find/replace history

To do list:

• Reverse searching

See also

ML - Heavily Modified & Improved

Comments

unperson Coding with Peter Campbell's ML editor is a real joy! It puts automatically colors to titles, comments, variables etc in the source code. This way, finding your way in your code and editing it is super easy with ML Editor!

It is a very simple, very functional and very elegant app; in many ways reminiscent of Windows 98 Notepad but with an added bonus: a delightful possibility of working with many windows from within the program, all windows are being called from the Window menu and closed on the File menu.

In fact there are more added bonuses. A second one is that the program remembers what file you left in the directory and the next time you start the program in that directory, it loads that file.

Contrary to Windows 98 which obstinately forces you to work in "My Documents" (what a terrible idea Microsoft people had!) and which gets you to "My Documents" no matter what, Peter Campbell's ML Editor gets you to the default data directory you choose.

And you can search and replace and make a search of all documents in your directory for a key word.

If you use ML Edit extensively, get ready to do some window management since the windowing concept is very present here. ML Edit will keep in memory all tcl programs you will have opened and it will open them all (each in its window of course) at start. What is the maximum of windows opened, I wonder...

Given this algorithm, it would only be wise to recommend to close some of your windows before leaving the program. This way, you won't start with 10 windows open... Which is of course not a problem if you have 512 megs of RAM as some (lucky) people do...

Perhaps one very important function is missing: one that would execute the script using JCW's excellent tcl.exe. It wouldn't be too hard to program, I believe. The user would indicate where tcl is located in his/her hard drive. Once this is done, when the user would call the execute function, the script would be copied in memory and pasted automatically into tcl.exe and the script would be running. We'd have something similar to the execute function in the C language. Right now we have to execute a lot of functions to execute the script we are working on.

Another idea: to have a list of procedures in a window. Clicking on a procedure would get us right to it. Sure beats 10 minutes of search!

Apart from that, ML tk edit is excellent!

All in all, ML Editor holds in 770k! Well done Peter Campbell, from New-Zealand and Brian Oakley, from the US of A!)