<Glazblog/>

I improved a lot code completion in this 0.61, it's almost ready...

• completion popup not shown any more when the user moves the caret from one token to another using arrow keys or the mouse pointer
• control-space key combination opens the completion popup if it can
• fixed two bugs when the token value the completion popup depends on is unrecognized
• changed the completion grammar to allow values that are available for all suggestion groups
• started optimizing the code

Autocompletion in Diavolo, my source code editor, is almost done. It's as usual defined in an XML grammar, and it's smart enough so it can depend on the value of a previous token. Arrow and page keys allow to navigate in the popup, tab key or click selects the current option, escape closes the popup. See by yourself:

L'édition 2008 de la superbe conférence ParisWeb se tiendra du 13 au 15 novembre. J'y serai, évidemment. Je vous proposerai, si les organisateurs l'acceptent, une présentation des nouveautés en chantier dans CSS ainsi qu'un rapport sur le fonctionnement du CSS WG. Si on me pousse un peu, je mettrai même mes bouts de code dans Diavolo ;-)

PS: quelqu'un a déjà réservé la grève des transports pour cette date ?-)

All the styles in my source editor Diavolo are now modifiable by the client. That will allow a UI to specify, modify, delete styles for a given grammar in the source editor. Yay :-)

The v0.4 of my source code editor Diavolo is available from here, as always. I think you'll like this new version:

• line numbering can be hidden
• click on a line number selects the line, and it's possible to extend the selection to other lines
• much better copy/paste, drag and drop with whitespace preservation; still some issues with refresh though
• much harder to freeze :-)
• improvements in the CSS grammar

Diavolo, my source code editor, is _almost_ done. Many thanks to Paul Rouget for his torture tests. You can test Diavolo using the last version of the DiavoloTest extension available here (FF3 required). It adds a new menu entry to the Tools menu.

I have a made a second XPI so you can test Diavolo, the source code editor for Mozilla, if you want. It's available from here, and adds a new menu entry "Diavolo Test" under the Tools menu. The test includes a CSS grammar. The Undo/Redo works much better (ctrl-Z/ctrl-Y) but is not entirely finalized. I also started encapsulating the whole thing into bindings for a <sourceeditor> xul tag but it's not ready yet.

I started writing my own transaction manager for Diavolo because of the problem I outlined in my previous article. For those of you who did not understand the problem let me explain :

• in the normal plaintext editor, if you type "foo > bar", the whole thing is aggregated into two transactions only : first create a text node, then insert the whole text inside that text node. The last transaction is in fact updated each time you add a character at the end of the text node. And both transactions are batched into a single container transaction so one Undo only removes the whole text
• in the source editor, when you type the first "f", the editor calls the tokeniser and then tries to resolve the token in the current grammar context. So the source editor creates a span with attributes specifying the token, the context, the role, and the expected context ; the original text node is moved as first child of that span. Then "oo" are added to that text node. The first whitespace is another token so the editor splits the text node in two and the right result is inserted inside a new span for the whitespace token. And so on for the new tokens ">" " " and "bar".

So aggregating "insert text" transactions is much harder in the latter case than in the former one, and that's why I started my own transaction manager. The way the existing nsTransactionManager works did not seem to me enough for the quality of Undo/Redo I want for Diavolo.

Even if I had written a new editor on top of nsEditor dealing only with text insertion and deletion based on start and end offsets in the text, I would still have to deal with coalescing text transactions in the transaction manager...

So I wrote a large part of my own transaction manager and six editor transactions until I tried something I did not think of with the existing txrmgr. And it worked. Sort of. Undo and Redo almost work correctly now BUT if you type "foo", Undo does not delete the whole token yet ; it undoes the last char only. Of course, when you paste/cut/delete/move text, it works fine. I'll try to improve the code but it'll be difficult. Let me call it a good compromise for the time being.

When that's done, I'll add auto-indent and I'll prepare everything needed to add the <sourceeditor> tag to the XUL toolkit. Line numbering is out of scope for the first release but I keep it in mind.

In terms of speed and performance, I am super glad ! It's really fast. It's also reasonably light since the whole thing is only 1286 lines of JS, excluding the grammar and the associated stylesheet but with comments, empty lines for readability, braces standing alone on a line and so on. I'll run the source through a JS optimizer, just to have an idea of what could be the target size of v1.0. Stay tuned :-)

I have a made a first XPI so you can test Diavolo, the source code editor for Mozilla, if you want. It's available from here, and adds a new menu entry "Diavolo Test" under the Tools menu. A few warnings:

1. it's still very experimental ; can freeze on copy/paste and such things, that's absolutely normal, it's still a work in progress...
2. the css grammar is not perfect yet and you'll notice a few errors that should not be reported.
3. the associated stylesheet is not perfect yet so don't scream if some tokens remain black ; they _are_ detected, but they remain unstyled.

(Just for the record, I am myself using a FF3.0pre to test it)

I reached the state where copy/paste and drag'n'drop now work beautifully. See by yourself (AVI, 7.5 megs)...