Thank you one and all I managed the font change and it is really nice compared to the Times New Roman Serif font. Much cleaner and crisper. Nick I thank you about the change request you pointed me to.
If I had to try to explain my IDE 'disenchantment' it would be the sparse environment.
As I tried to explain... sometimes more bells and whistles are better, simply because they encourage experimentation, more so than the nice albeit plain Vanilla environment that the Arduino IDE does and it gives me a chance to learn to write "regular C++" instead of includes, function prototypes, setup() and loop()... Not that I now can do any of those well... Yet.
The Arduino is a teaching environment more than a really great programmable "Brick". It is a very fine teaching environment and while I don't think I have exhausted, by any means the examples and the other training tools.
The C++ books I read, Prata's Primers, 5&6, Prats's C Primer, Cplusplus. I like C++ In a Nutshell. All the other fine free and not so free books are difficult to experiment with in order to see how the examples work and how to 'work' them.
One day I would like to write things that are more platform independent and the day I don't feel is when I am finally an Arduino Wizard. In other words much of my learning will be done on the Arduino but now I have a chance to 'dabble' in a wider playground as well and perhaps be able to apply my learning to better Arduino code as well as having the chance to possibly write code for other platforms.
I have that Renasys RL78 challenge board and I have both the STM32 discovery board as well as the TI Launchpad MSP430 offering. I bought these parts because 1. they were inexpensive (except the renasys) and 2. because they are a good (I think) stepping stone to more advanced and easier to implement complex solutions.
There are things I would like to do that involve mice and keyboards and while they are do-able with other Arduino Variants they still use the (so far) 8 bit chips.
The Duo from what little I can see is intended to overcome some of those issues... But it is for the most part a fiction on paper... So far.
I am led to those conclusions by the dearth of real information.
My other reason is that there are things like the Chipkit, the Leonardo (alluded to above) and several other offerings that look more like garage adaptations of the basic Arduino environment, neither here nor there and not quite as 'mainstream' as the STM or the Renasys or for that manner the Ti .
The Arduino adaptations are just that, adaptations. The STM and it's ilk are intended for one purpose and one only. That is to sell product IC in 10's of thousands of pieces. The same is true of the other products.
In many ways the Arduino is a Basic Stamp on steroids. It includes all or nearly all the things left out of the Stamp. One failing of the stamp is it's speed and the other is it's totally messed up (The word I wanted to use starts with an "F") 2K X 12 banked memory map with 4, 512 byte "banks" of ram for program area. I used those chips 10 years ago and never again.
The Arduino uses C++ and it is a free extensible and good implementation of the language, where the Stamp used a crippled basic really only good for simple products, It won't work with one wire, SPI IIC and the available program area could get lost in the eeprom area of an Uno. The final factor for me was trying to read a DH11... The Picaxe products are a simpler implementation more suited to 6th graders, Great in the 'variety' and arguably better than the Stamp but again because of the interpreted environment crippled, Even @ 64 mhz (16 mhz clock and a 4X pll) the device isn't fast enough. They do make useful data collection devices where an Uno would be overkill and small process controllers as well under the same conditions.
The Arduino is a great beginning but for the reasons that make it a teaching device, a powerful teaching device but still primarily a teaching device
I am nowhere near exhausting the learning opportunities presented by the Arduino and it won't be anytime soon that I am. However it would make the learning better If I could in parallel be able to use the "Big Boys" books to better advantage and to know how it is done on both and the differences of both. An example might well be writing an interface for the Arduino and the PC, something that certainly can't be done on a Mega, With a mega as a subject but not to code a windows interface on.
This would allow me to expand the Arduino's capabilities... When I learn enough to do it...
There is always the thought that 1. It's Free and from the documentation well suited to many tasks that the basic IDE simply isn't. and 2. It is a gateway into PC programming as well. All Strictly IMO and very much subject to whatever critiques that are created by both sides of the argument.
Doc