MCA,This is a response to your critique of the KiXscripts Editor. First of all, thanks so much for taking your time providing these comments. I've found them to be tremendously helpful. Now, onto my defense...
You made a large number of comments, just about all I agree with totally. Just to pick out a couple...
Your issues regarding the start menu, file associations at install, line and column numbers, and "off-line" help are all right on the money.
quote:
the installation process install files on different places. Can the in-
stallation process be modified for using only ONE directory for all required
files.
All the files installed go into the application directory with the exception of required DLL and OCX files which are added to the system directory.
quote:
Also a lot of settings are hold in the HKCU part of the registry. Can
you make it possible that KiXscripts editor can start without this re-
gistry part?
You then show a shot of all the preference listings under HKCU
Without these entries there is no way to capture user preferences regarding keyword/comment colors and styles, tab size, mru size, whether or not you want to view tabs or the toolbar, etc. Are you suggesting an option that doesn't write any preferences to the registry? To an INI file perhaps? I'm not quite sure what your underlying issue is.
quote:
generating of "Variable List" too slow for an average script (= 971 lines with
90 different keys).
Our tool kixref can analyze it in 0.33 sec. This editor command was after
15 minutes not completed and was closed.
(we were testing our personal version of "cleanup.kix" script from our site)
--AND--
quote:
during the generating of "Variable List" it isn't possible to continue editing
(another) script. Also the "Variable List" window stays on top.
Can this be changed?
The algorithm used to retrieve the list of variables is unbearably slow for large files, I agree 100%. This needs to be sped up significantly before the product leaves beta. I've never seen it take 15 minutes though even for large files. If possible could you send me the file and I'll give it a whirl?
As for the second point, we decided to make that window "stay on top" since if you click off of it it disappears behind the script editor itself and we found during Alpha testing that it confused people so we kept it on top.
quote:
other possible wizards can be:
- color
- SetFileAttr
- SetOption
We do have a color wizard already in there. The others are good ideas.
quote:
can an user influence the keyword tables? See f.e. TextPad possibilities.
Possible something for a future release.
The kix keywords and macros are hard-coded. But we've already got plans for custom keywords and intellisense based on an external text file. This could be useful for DOS commands, KixwinVB, or any number of things one wanted to add.
Thanks again, MCA, and if you or anyone has any more suggestions we'd love to hear them here or at the kixscripts.com forum where we have a topic dedicated to KiXscripts editor feature requests.
Take care all,
Steven Behrns
kixscripts.com
