SynCase v8

No downloadable development version yet

3 Apr 2024

No determined compatibility yet.

SynCase v7 updates the case of a text's words to the case of keywords in TSE's syntax hiliting definitions.

SynCase v8's additional goals:

• Make TSE updates not overwrite SynCase's syntax hiliting.
• Make TSE's syntax hiliting more easily maintainable thru text files.
• Optionally make those text files automatically updatable from "distro" files automatically downloaded from my website.
• Remove the capability to set non-keywords to upper or lower case.

 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 |Actions                                                     |
 |  Help                                                      |
 |  Case the whole current buffer                             |
 |------------------------------------------------------------|
 |Settings                                                    |
 |  Language [                                            sal]|
 |    Should its .syncase file                                |
 |      Duplicate TSE's syntax hiliting definitions      [Yes]|
 |      Case the language's keywords                     [Yes]|
 |    Should its .syncase_distro file                         |
 |      Add    new      keywords   to the .syncase file  [Yes]|
 |      Update existing keywords   in the .syncase file  [Yes]|
 |      Renove obsolete keywords from the .syncase file  [Yes]|
 |      Itself be updated [                     Automatically]|
 |    Show its settings log file ...                          |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+
               

DirList41.zip

v4.0.0.7

11 Mar 2024

Windows TSE v4.50 rc 18 upwards (to be expanded),
Linux TSE v4.50 rc 18 upwards (not expandable).

"DirList41" is the development version of the future "DirList" v4.1.

New so far:

• In Windows DirList is now default independent of its environment's language settings.
  This is achieved by retrieving link targets with Windows functions instead of dir commands.
  This is a major step forward, even if it did create new loose ends.
  Example loose ends:
  - Link targets starting with weird prefixes.
  - The Windows functions and the dir command each do not retrieve some of the other's details. The now default Windows functions do not retrieve some details of the link type. So I will still have to apply the dir command too for those languages for which the dir output can be interpreted.
• Gained a small but significant speed optimization by optimizing BigInt.
  The access status column is now an access error column. Therefore when there is no error, "ok" is replaced by "-". When sorting this sorts all access errors together.
  The "no link" indicator was changed from "." to "-". It subjectively looks better, and "-" is in my TSE WordSet, which helps accessing the column.
  DirList's speed was increased again by only retrieving link targets for the link types that have them: junctions and symbolic links.
  The --alllinktargets parameter generates the old list.
  The --folowlinks parameter makes DirList list the child objects of directory links again. This is not recommended.
• Links are no longer followed.
  This greatly reduces the run time and list size, and linked subdirectories are no longer counted multiple times in a common parent's directory size.
  The following of links will later become a non-default option.
• The link type column was condensed to be smaller.
• The column for TSE accessility is now a string indicating a reason.
• A link indicator (Linux) or type (Windows) column was added. Windows has a lot of link types.
• Windows: For junctions and symbolic links the link type and the link's target is now shown. It is shown between square brackets after the name, like "dir /al" does.

Still todo for DirList v4.1:

• Lots of (hopefully small) loose ends.

20 Oct 2023

DirList → Test → DirList → Unibrowse → Remote editing

One thing is leading to another, again.

Initially I just wanted to implement remote editing for the HTTP(S) and SSH protocols.

However, remote filenames can contain Unicode characters too, and TSE does not natively support them. So I researched if it would make sense to make the new functionality part of the existing UniBrowse extension, which for one handles local filenames that possibly contain Unicode characters. My conclusion is that it does. The Unibrowse extension also implements browsing directories and files that are extended with alternate data streams. In examining the UniBrowse extension I was confronted with my earlier design choice to implement listing and accessing "Unicode names" and alternate data streams with Dos commands instead of Windows APIs. Some googling to revisit that decision this time turned up Windows APIs that do not seem too hard. Using Windows APIs would speed up Unibrowse immensly and make it a lot more robust. Before committing to a big tool like UniBrowse, it makes sense to first try these new APIs in a limited tool like DirList. And before that an even more limited test macro to just test if using these APIs from TSE actually works.

So here I currently am, updating DirList, to later write a test macro testing Windows file APIs, to maybe later rewrite DirList to use them, to maybe later rewrite UniBrowse to use them, and to maybe eventually extend UniBrowse with remote editing capabilities.

And here I am again, contemplating rewriting another core part of the editor using its macro language, this time its file handling. I am aware of the absurdity.