I was doing something like that, but the effect was not really worth it.
1. Every editor handles these differently. Maintaining configuration files for many 3rd party editors? They would lost their purpose very fast, as the game changes often.
2. They doesn't give that much freedom. I can't make a live preview for SatCom files in a second panel or check if links work without opening the game or many other things. For example, gtksourceview default styles doesn't give that much options (specifying more than a half things as "def:type" or "def
tatement"... what's the point of highlighting really if nearly everything has the same colour?).
3. There is often no easy way for detection. I would need to set the syntax highlighting and maybe even special style every time I wanted to edit something related to Colobot.
4. How to even work with translations? I would want to see the original English file and with one click view the according line in *.po files.
Our formatting syntaxes are not very common. It would be a totally different story if we had some sort of script language as CBOT, or HTML as SatCom and so on, but we don't. Do you know how many times I had to rerun the game because of missing semicolon, newline, wrong indentation and so on? Of course, all of these problem could be solved by making separate modules for some 3rd party programs and linking them together, but I don't like the idea of downloading, installing, configuring etc. 10 applications just to have an unstable and unconnected directly substitute of Colobot development environment.
And note that these things are not something that is unsolvable or doesn't let the work be done. But all these little problems culminated are slowing down the work. What I want to achieve with this editor (or set of editors, whatever) is simplicity, which by definition results in faster results. Something like "oh, I need to edit some CBOT AI, let's open the CBOT editor!" instead of "oh, I need to edit some CBOT AI, let's open an editor... wait, where is my syntax highlighting, oh, I need to set tabulators instead of spaces, hmm, how to use that instruction, well, maybe I will run the game to check, oh man, maybe there is a better editor out there, let's find something...".
1. Every editor handles these differently. Maintaining configuration files for many 3rd party editors? They would lost their purpose very fast, as the game changes often.
2. They doesn't give that much freedom. I can't make a live preview for SatCom files in a second panel or check if links work without opening the game or many other things. For example, gtksourceview default styles doesn't give that much options (specifying more than a half things as "def:type" or "def
tatement"... what's the point of highlighting really if nearly everything has the same colour?).3. There is often no easy way for detection. I would need to set the syntax highlighting and maybe even special style every time I wanted to edit something related to Colobot.
4. How to even work with translations? I would want to see the original English file and with one click view the according line in *.po files.
Our formatting syntaxes are not very common. It would be a totally different story if we had some sort of script language as CBOT, or HTML as SatCom and so on, but we don't. Do you know how many times I had to rerun the game because of missing semicolon, newline, wrong indentation and so on? Of course, all of these problem could be solved by making separate modules for some 3rd party programs and linking them together, but I don't like the idea of downloading, installing, configuring etc. 10 applications just to have an unstable and unconnected directly substitute of Colobot development environment.
And note that these things are not something that is unsolvable or doesn't let the work be done. But all these little problems culminated are slowing down the work. What I want to achieve with this editor (or set of editors, whatever) is simplicity, which by definition results in faster results. Something like "oh, I need to edit some CBOT AI, let's open the CBOT editor!" instead of "oh, I need to edit some CBOT AI, let's open an editor... wait, where is my syntax highlighting, oh, I need to set tabulators instead of spaces, hmm, how to use that instruction, well, maybe I will run the game to check, oh man, maybe there is a better editor out there, let's find something...".
![[Image: XvN5CTW.png]](http://i.imgur.com/XvN5CTW.png)
![[Image: UYXyyMS.png]](http://i.imgur.com/UYXyyMS.png)