Folding Lingo on OSX
I’ve been using BBEdit for a dozen years or so and make extensive use of the program for many daily tasks (grep stuff, misc. html editing, etc.). A rather powerful tool for specific needs.
For BBEdit/Lingo coding there has been a way to colorize your scripts using a Language plug-in written by Avacast. I’ve never used external scripts when working with Director, but I occasionally copy and paste a script in to an external editor, make my changes, and then copy/paste it back in to Director. The colorized text in BBEdit has always been nice.
BareBones released BBEdit v8.5 last week and one of the new features is code folding. That feature would be pretty nice for dealing with long lingo scripts! It was mentioned on a mailing list that Lingo didn’t seem to be folding so I decided to take a look. It definitely didn’t seem to fold. It seems as if the language plug-in will need to be updated, and the new plug-in SDK hasn’t yet been released.
Since that one isn’t quite ready yet I decided to take a look at TextMate which I’d seen mentioned in a MacDevCenter post.
I played with TextMate for a few minutes. The program supports a large number of programming languages and has a wealth of features associated with each language. The program is extremely flexible for editing language syntax and extension of features! On their site I noticed that Lingo had been requested, but no one had taken time to create a Lingo “Bundle.”
One thing about Lingo is that the structure is a bit like AppleScript, so rather than spending time working on creating a Lingo bundle I just chose AppleScript as the syntax and started typing.
The script took on some color, and is being automatically indented. For some things autocompletion kicks in. Of course my entire reason for looking at the program was for code folding, and as you can see, it does a rather good job with lingo code.
I’m really impressed with TextMate and may end up getting a copy just to have around when editing a few scripts. Maybe the next version of Director will have a much better script editor 😉
2 comments September 11th, 2006