A few IDE enhancements please..

Just a few suggestions regarding the Arduino IDE. I feel like it has less capabilities than notepad.exe, and definately less than gEdit (both standard text editors, with gEdit having code-features). I don't expect to see full intellisense/intellitype in the IDE, although that would be cool, but there are some things that would bring it up to speed with some of the other editors out there.

  • Drag Text - I use this all the time in other editors, when I need to move a codeline/comment I just drag it, or drag multiple lines where I need them. I guess internally its just a "Drag: Cut highlighted text from cursor position, Drop: Insert clipboard text to new cursor position.
  • Better Highlights - Needs to recognize more words without having to edit keywords.txt, alot of C functions don't get highlighted while arduino functions do. Just makes code more readable to me. I noticed when i used itoa() it wasn't highlighted which made me think I wasn't allowed to use it or something. Thats another thing that would make the language easier to learn I think. maybe keywords.txt is fine, it just needs to be more complete from the start.
  • Better Indention - Using tab to indent gets crazy sometimes, could mean 2,3 or 4 space widths. I just noticed that tabbing over to indent doesn't always take me where I want to be. I have to add a space or remove a space here or there to line stuff up. A lot of editors recognize tab/spacing width, but you would really only need to pick a standard width and stick with it.
  • AutoComplete? - doesn't have to be some huge thing that reads user variables or functions from the code, it could mean just listing the built-in functions, or functions from included headers or libraries. At least give me that, it would certainly make learning the libraries easier if I knew exactly what functions they contained. Right now, I open the header file and browse it to get a sense of whats in it, but that takes a bit too long sometimes. A nice autocomplete feature with a drop-down combo that could be turned on/off would be nice.

I usually don't write comments like these, I learn to work with what I've got. I have high hopes for Arduino, and I feel like it could be so much more than it is with just a few little tweaks here or there. I've been coding for quite some time, though I'm just now getting into C/C++, and I see a few areas where learning the language could be made easier or faster with just a hint of recognition from the IDE.

P.S. > Make ArduinoISP sketch work out of the box for 1.0+! please, i've been hacking/editing like crazy and it works for me, just not out of the box. As a new comer it was quite frustrating to think I was doing something wrong when it was actually arduino claiming it could do something it could not. Like: "Try out all of our examples to learn the language, except for that one, it doesn't work. But we're not gonna tell you that out front, you have to search for it and learn from our users." Then why did you include it? Very confusing. If it doesn't work take it out, I'll google a working version. But please don't dangle that example in front of me just so I can find out its incompatible. (this isn't anger if it reads that way, just trying to help and i wasn't exactly sure if you'd heard this from a normal noob user yet.)

With the actual IDE it is a lot of work add those stuff, but I will love to have "autocomplete", too bad I can't add it without a lot of effort, and it is a bit pointless with the current IDE.

What is going wrong with ArduinoISP?

This comes up all the time cjwelborn, it's always been ignored and probably always will be.

There are a couple of threads running at present

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,120882.0.html

I think the best thing to do is use another editor (I use Notepad++) or another IDE. The Visual Studio version worked well last time I tried it and it looks to have become a really nice programming environment.


Rob