SX/B - Version 1.50.01 (05 JUL 2006)
Jon Williams
Posts: 6,491
Dear SXers,
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Parallax is very pleased to announce many additions and enhancements to the SX-Key IDE v 3.2, centered around the new SX/B 1.50. The entire package is available for download at http://www.parallax.com/sx/downloads.asp.
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Post Edited By Moderator (Bean (Hitt Consulting)) : 7/8/2006 1:05:31 PM GMT
·
Parallax is very pleased to announce many additions and enhancements to the SX-Key IDE v 3.2, centered around the new SX/B 1.50. The entire package is available for download at http://www.parallax.com/sx/downloads.asp.
·
Post Edited By Moderator (Bean (Hitt Consulting)) : 7/8/2006 1:05:31 PM GMT
Comments
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
Dallas Office
Update done 11/2/2004 to include "@" symbol in the index.
P.S. There's a U.S. national election today. Vote!
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
Dallas Office
thanks
It seems pretty obvious now that 'Top' file must mean something completely different. I have one file in particular now that causes a promt, 'This file is a "Top" file. Do you want it to be set as the current "Top"? yea or nea. Every time I open it. I haven't looked, but I suspect a registry edit is going to be required to eliminate the prompt from happening every time I open that file.
I confess to having *no* idea at this point what the "Top" file is about. Somebody throw me a bone.
On another note, I find myself trying to do CTRL-A to do a select all in the IDE, which of course invokes the assembler. It is useful to develop code snippets in one window, then cut and paste to the work in progress.
Any thoughts on assembling being changed to perhaps Alt-A so the normal Windows editing shortcuts can be used?
Thanks
Mike Chadwick
Top files are handy when your projects consist of two or more files, i.e. one "main file", and one or more include files. In this case, you should make the "Main file" the "Top file". Right-click on the file name in the left file list area, and select "Set as top file". The file name is then displayed in bold in the file list.
After having defined one file as the Top file, the IDE "knows" which file shall be passed to the Assembler when you hit Ctrl-A, no matter which file is currently displayed in the edit window. Without having defined a Top file, the IDE would pass the file currently displayed to the Assembler, e.g. an include file which does not make much sense.
You can remove the "Top file" attribute by right-clicking on its name in the file list, and selecting "Set as normal file" there.
Concerning the use of Ctrl-A, I'm sure Peter will have comments on that.
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Greetings from Germany,
G
Guenther gave an excellent description of the "Top" file feature. The documentation for the new IDE has not been completed, hence that are some "hidden" features that haven't been well documented yet. As for "Top", believe me, nothing is more annoying than working on a project with multiple source files and having to remember to manually switch back to the editor that has the "main" (or "Top") file in it. I was so jazzed about integrating SASM since it meant I could finally have "include" files, only to find that working with multiple source projects was more trouble than it was worth.
I added the "Top" feature to make it as easy as possible to work with multiple source projects. For example, "under the hood" the IDE keeps a list of the twenty most recently used "Top" files. This means that you can have up to twenty multiple source projects in your workflow at any given time, and you only have to tell the IDE about each one only once. I didn't want to add project files because as James Newton pointed out, the SX-Key has always been about getting started and moving quickly without a lot of mandatory overhead. My goal has always been to make new features as transparent as possible. For example, switch between an assembly project and an SX/B project, and take a look at the "Run" menu. You'll see when you switch to an assembly project, it has an "Assemble" menu item, but switch to an SX/B project and now it says "Compile." I also make the toolbar hints switch as well. It's this sort of detail that make the IDE feel smooth, but that takes a lot of extra time to implement and test. Go into the configuration dialog and uncheck "Use SASM" or uncheck "Use Enhanced Editor" to see more examples of effort to make the IDE do the right thing for the user. I could have chosen to just gray out the controls, but I feel this is better, even though it took me way more time to implement.
As for your question about CTRL-A, I feel the exact same way. I am a keyboard shortcut kind of guy, and find the abduction of CTRL-A annoying. However, I haven't changed it for compatibility reasons. The tricky thing about changing software used by the public (as opposed to something for me and me only) is that I have to think about what this change means to everyone else using the software. If I just blithely change the shortcut key, then a ton of people are going to get upset about it because they are used to CTRL-A meaning assemble. Thus, to change it, I need to make it a switchable option, available via the configuration dialog. This means having to modify the configuration GUI, write the code to store and retrieve the value from the registry, test that all of this works without bugs, and then someone would have to update the documentation so that people understnd this new feature.
As you can see, simply changing the shortcut to something else would take all of two minutes, but to modify the IDE so that it handles this as a user selectable option is a far greater amount of work. Of course, this is assuming that you and I aren't the only ones who want to use CTRL-A for selecting all the text! It's all a balancing act of the time to implement the feature versus the number of people who will use or benefit from the change. This is the reason why I try to never say a feature won't be implemented, because it's always possible that the enough people will request something that a lower priority feature will percolate up to the top of the list.
Thanks, PeterM
PS - Man, I think I just wrote a novel in reply to a simple question!
http://www.sxlist.com/techref/parallax/sxkey.htm
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yeah - I knew I missed something, but as expected, Peter has described it in full detail. Its the feature that the IDE can keep track of 20 of the most recently used "Top files", and right-clicking on the name of the currently open "Top file" even allows you to remove it from the "Top-20".
I once discussed with Peter if it might make sense to integrate kind of a "Project Manager" within the SX-Key IDE, as known from other IDEs. But in the end, I like the "Top file" approach much better because it keeps it simple (and not really stupid), and does exactly what you need when working on multiple-file projects.
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Greetings from Germany,
G
If you switch to another editor, you need to click in the new editor to provide focus for scroll wheel events.
Thanks, PeterM
I only just thought about trying to run the program in Win98 compatible mode on XP, I'll have to see if that cures the window problems.
Mike
I had to post a reply to apologize to Peter M, who probably thinks I'm nuts. I just discovered that the issue with the scroll wheel events was because I wasn't using a real scroll wheel. I've been using the touch pad on my laptop, and the 'scroll area' events only get to the last file loaded. I'm on the road using a mini optical mouse, and it works just fine under WinXP on any file loaded.
Boy do I feel silly......... but I'm really glad I finally found this out.
Mike
I'm glad you figured it out as well. I couldn't think of any logical reason that scroll events would go to only one file in the IDE. Also, since no one else ever mentioned the problem, I had to think that it was something specific to yuor setup. Glad to hear to got it worked out.
Thanks, PeterM
Help File 21April
SX/B Aliases:
· •· PA2 Page Select bit 2 STATUS.7·······
· •· PA1 Page Select bit 1 STATUS.6·······
· •· PA0 Page Select bit 1 STATUS.5·······
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Should be:
· •· PA2 Page Select bit 2 STATUS.7·······
· •· PA1 Page Select bit 1 STATUS.6·······
· •· PA0 Page Select bit 0 STATUS.5·
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Thank You
David Winchell
David@Winchell.com
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
Dallas, TX· USA
My mini laptop mouse's scroll wheel works fine. So it's not very specialized. I would like this to be fixed, as I use my laptop a lot without the mouse. Hopefully it's not a major problem. Maybe by giving focus to the file just selected would work, or giving focus to the file editor then back to the file selector, changing the order and maybe directing all focus that doesn't fit with the file selector there. I don't know, as I haven't done much Windows programming lately.
I apologize if I am missing the clearly obvious.
-Shane
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Jon Williams
Applications Engineer, Parallax
the idea is to control a robot and to vary the times on each servo to make it move while the other servos stay in the same position...
thanks.
Ryan
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Ryan Clarke
Parallax Tech Support
RClarke@Parallax.com