TCL Developer Studio
Table of Contents
What is it?
TCL Developer Studio (TCLDev for short) - is developer environment for
tcl developing. It is written by using TCL/TK language and Tix library.
It is tested under Windows and Linux/PC and should work under any platform,
which has TCL/TK and Tix. It is tested with TCL/TK 8.0.4.
Now, TCLDev has very user-friendly interface, a rich editor with many
useful features, file tree for easy navigation and output window, which
is used for show output information.
How to get it?
See TCL Developer studio page: http://www.star.spb.ru/~small/tcldev
License
The TCLDev is released under GPL license. For more information see: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Known bugs
The debug window does not work under Windows.
Menu shortcuts does not always work under Windows.
The debug window does not works under Linux with TCL/TK 8.0.3 and less.
Are You found bug?
Please, report me: mailto:small@star.spb.ru
Short user guide
TCLDev has optional argument - file name. If file name specified, TCLDev
opens this file on running.
TCLDev has a main menu, toolbar and other windows. If you set mouse
pointer to button in toolbar and wiat - you will see balloon help. Also,
toolbar has a find combo-box. You can simple insert any text and press
enter and TCLDev will search this string in current file. Also it hase
search history.
There are status bar at the bottom the TCLDev window. It contains
help string, time field, and cursor position. You can click on line
number for first call Go to dialog
Windows
The work windows separated to three part: File
Tree Window, Output window, Editor
Window. You can change size of these windows easy.
File tree window
File tree window showes tree. This tree contain file nodes. There are different
icons for text file, tcl file and project file nodes. Each file node contains
a procedures. You can easy go to any procedure by selecting it in the tree.
TCLDev automatically updates this tree, but sometimes it may be outdated.
Just right-click on tree and say "Refresh" for updating it.
Output window
THe purpose of this window is showing output information. It contain two
pages: debug and find. There you run your program TCLDev redirect stdout
and stderr to it debug page. Then you use Find
In Files feature, TCLDev showes all founded string in Find page. You
can go to any of founded line by clicking on it.
Editor window
In the editor window you edit your programs. This window has very useful
features like:
-
Sintax highliting. TCLDev highlights comments and first command in the
line.
-
Indent. TCLDev starts new line from such position, like previuse
-
Sintax indent. The indentation of line depended from scope.
-
Pair highlighting. TCLDev find pair for some special chars, like [,{,(
and highlights them.
-
Language templates. Just type foreach. TCLDev type other for you.
-
Undo/Redo functions
-
You can disable and configure these features by options
dialog.
Also TCLDev has a set of advanced editor features, which can be selected
from Edit|Advanced menu:
-
Format selection. Format selection with nice indent.
-
Comment selection. Set # in start of each selected window.
-
Tabify selection. Change all spaces to tabs. It change the user specified
number of spaces into one tab. Note, what TK text widget has a bad tab
support, and I do not recommend use it.
-
Untabify selection. Change all tabs to spaces.
-
Make selection uppercase
-
Make selection lowercase
-
Strip selection. Delete all whitespace character at the end of lines in
the selection
-
Indent selection. Indent selection by one space
-
Unindent selection
Find and other
TCLDev has three find dialogs: Find dialog, Replace dialog and Find in
Files dialog. From find dialog you can find any string or regular expression
in the current file. You can repeat last search by Find Next function.
From replace dialog you can replace any string or regular expression by
another string. You can replace one occurence or all in the current file.
Find in files dialog searchs string in multiple files and output result
to the find page in the output window
Go to ...
BY using go to dialog you can go to the selected file or procedure in the
file very fast. This dialog runs from Edit|Go to menu or by clicking line
number in the status bar.
Project Management
In the TCLDev implemented very simple project management.
All project settings are stored in the project file. You can create
new project from "New" dialog by selecting "Project" icon or from Project|New
menu.
The TCLDev project file is an ordinary tcl file. All project settings
are stored in the comments. Then you load this file, TCLDev asks you to
load it as project file. If you say "no", TCLDev loads it as ordinary tcl
file. But if you say "yes", it reads all project settings from file, loads
it and delete all project settings from file. So, you will not see it in
editor.
All project settings may be specific for concrete OS, or may be common.
TCLDev see OS specific value, and if it is not specified, it sees common
value. So, you can specify different paths, commands and others project
settings for different OS. Now, only settings for windows and unix are
specified.
The projects settings are:
-
Name of project
-
Project directory. TCLDev will works in this directory
-
Run Command. If this command is specified, you can run you program from
TCLDev
-
Debug command. If this command is specified, you can run debugger from
TCLDev
-
File Comment. You can define text, which will be added to all new tcl files.
In this text you can use format fields from clock command (%Y or %D for
example)
If you do not specify run or debug, these buttons and menu items
will greyed. You should specify these options for activate them.
Then you close project TCLDev ask you to save it.
Options
In options dialog user can edit different TCLDev options. It has
four pages: Common, Editor, Font and Print.
On the Common page you can edit Tix Options: select color and font
scheme. I am highly recommend restart TCLDev after it.
On editor page you can edit a set of editors options:
-
Use Indent and sintax indent and set indent size;
-
Change tab to spaces and specify tab size;
-
Use highlighting or not;
-
Use templaces for diferent symbols or no.
If you use slow machine for editing a big file TCLDev may be unusable.
In this case try to disable sintax highlighting and sintax indent.
On font page you can specify size and code page of editor font. In
future there will complete font selector.
On the Print page you may change some print options, like default printer
name, line numbering and pretty printing.
All options are stored in options file (~/.tcldevrc in Unix or tcldev.cfg
in Windows). Also TCLDev remember dialogs positions, information about
files and some other information. You can delete this file for deleting
all these information.
Keyboard bindings
Here is a list of used keyboard bindings, used in TCLDev:
Ctrl-Insert or Ctrl-c for copying selection to the clipboard
Ctrl-Delete or Ctrl-x for cutting selection to the clipboard
Shift-Insert or Ctrl-v for inserting text from clipboard
Ctrl-a for selecting all text in the current file
Ctrl-n for create new file
Ctrl-o for onep existing file
Ctrl-s for saving current file
Ctrl-f for calling "Find" dialog
Ctrl-l for repeating search
Ctrl-h for calling "Replace" dialog
Ctrl-g for calling go to dialog
Ctrl-z undo
Ctrl-y redo
Ctrl-p for printing current file
Ctrl-Shift-f format selection
Ctrl-Shift-c comment selection
Ctrl-Shift-i indent selection
Ctrl-Shift-u unindent Selection