Make PNut A Little More Friendly?
JonnyMac
Posts: 8,926
in Propeller 2
I know that PNut is a temporary. That said, it's what we have to compile and test official Spin2 code, so it would be nice if it was a little more friendly.
Suggestions:
-- Change [Ctrl]+[A] to Edit\Select All -- as in virtually every other computer program. If we need to see the version number, clicking the Help menu is not a problem.
-- Add a right-click context menu to the edit field. Include Cut, Copy, Paste, and Select All (minimum)
-- Add a thumbnail position control to the edit field; it can get tedious spinning the mouse wheel through long listings.
I'm sure I'm not the only one copying-and-pasting code between other editors and PNut; I think these changes would facilitate that.
Suggestions:
-- Change [Ctrl]+[A] to Edit\Select All -- as in virtually every other computer program. If we need to see the version number, clicking the Help menu is not a problem.
-- Add a right-click context menu to the edit field. Include Cut, Copy, Paste, and Select All (minimum)
-- Add a thumbnail position control to the edit field; it can get tedious spinning the mouse wheel through long listings.
I'm sure I'm not the only one copying-and-pasting code between other editors and PNut; I think these changes would facilitate that.
Comments
Two weeks ago, Chip got Jeff launched with Propeller Tool improvements for the P2. Jeff has been working on that for over a week and should have some progress to share soon.
Chip needs to finish Spin and produce properly documented objects. The P2's success is going to depend on what kind of drivers he can create and document to get things going, hopefully enough to fuel the community to make contributions. While Chip may be able to make these Pnut improvements easily, I'd advise him against it for now in favor of creating objects. Plus, none of these things ever happen quickly - it could take a day or two for him to do this.
Would you agree? Would you rather see his effort go towards objects and have Jeff make the Propeller Tool a more professional system? As you can see, Chip is also looking at machine learning and while it's going to be a topic of interest at some point, we have more primitive needs in our roadmap to release.
Ken Gracey
It's possible to have both PropTool and pnut open with the same source file - just save in PropTool after editing, and then make sure you reload the file in pnut before compiling. I also have PST open too so that I can then switch to see any serial data in my P2 program after it loads.
I should really use VSCode to edit the spin2 since I use it at work every day - I've set up syntax highlighting for P2 which includes the old spin names (there is a VSCode thread posted on the P2 forum section for this - sorry, don't have a link handy)
Pnut can now be driven from the command line, so can be invoked just to do the download to ram or flash. That might make it easier to use favourite editors
Not saying those suggestions wouldn't be useful, and take Ken's point. But perhaps hooking up external editors to Pnut can be done already
I have been using Propeller Tool, but pasting into PNut instead of saving to a file with a .spin extention. I also use EditPlus for clean-up duties. It has the ability to call command line tools, so I may settle on that.