Find the matching tag or delimiter

Bill M. · Post by **Bill M.** » Fri May 12, 2006 4:33 am

It could be useful to be able to find not just the matching bracket, but the matching tag or delimiter in the search menu. You almost have given us this, with the ability to Select Tag block but (1) going to a tag is different from highlighting all the markup between tags, and (2) it doesn't always behave as expected when it can't find a matching tag.

charlesroper · Post by **charlesroper** » Thu May 18, 2006 1:07 pm

I agree Bill - a keyboard shortcut for flipping between beginning and end tags is one of those features that's small, inconspicuous , but incredibly handy. Yet another one of those features that made TopStyle feel so polished.

I'm actually far more keen on seeing little productivity enhancements like this polished off before seeing bigger features such as SQL editing/diffing etc.

Post by **syrupcore** » Thu May 18, 2006 9:47 pm

I'm actually far more keen on seeing little productivity enhancements like this polished off before seeing bigger features such as SQL editing/diffing etc.

I'll second that one.

Post by **Karlis** » Sat May 20, 2006 6:07 pm

nice nice ideas

Post by **syrupcore** » Mon May 22, 2006 4:16 am

Of course, small usability enhancements don't 'sell' as well on the home page of blumentals.net or on press releases to slashdot or blurbs on shareware download sites. It's these bits of usability that makes webuilder feel like it was built by a developer, not a marketing department though. It's certainly what sold me and gets me to encourage other developers to check it out. I realize we all use webuilder differently. I dont use lots of the front page selling points of Webuilder: the SQL browser, the 'inspector', or the ever popular built in preview. I use Webuilder because it's quick and I can do little things with keyboard shortcuts that help me get my crap done faster.

I imagine it's difficult to choose which to enhance as a developer, seeing as the revenue from upgrades alone on a product this comptetitively priced probably is not going to cover all the bills or send the kids to school. There has to be some amount of buzzword new features to draw in new customers.

blah blah blah. thanks for all the work karlis and good luck straddling the line.

Post by **syrupcore** » Mon May 22, 2006 4:44 am

re: new customers

I know I've said it before but I really think you might very seriously consider getting Ruby and Ruby on Rails support into the Webuilder series quickly before the fad dies. I just did a google search that turned up 14,200,000 hits for "Ruby on Rails". The guy that came up with it got the Orielly/Google Hacker of the Year award for 2005 - the kind of stuff that marketers don't care about but makes geeks pay attention.

http://www.rubyonrails.org/applications to see a pretty impressive list of interesting 'web 2.0' (sorry, yuck) applications built on top of the rails framework. Be sure to click the 'even more' to see the full list reported at this point. The framework makes it very easy to make buzzworthy DB backed applications and because of this it's gaining in popularity everyday, stealing at least the hearts of Java developers left and right. Some people are using it to replace the all mighty and very very loved Perl for godsake.

There's currently only one PC editor that fully understands Rails (RadRails). It's pretty nice but it's held back by it's dependance on the somewhat slow Eclipise engine.

Like I said above, I also would rather see small enhancements to usability functions than new big features but if you were to ask my opinion on what make Webuilder standout amoung the see of code editors out there (I know, you didn't ask), I gotta say it's Ruby on Rails.

2 cents, again.

Will

Bill M. · Post by **Bill M.** » Wed May 24, 2006 1:16 am

I chose WeBuilder because of its nice HTML/CSS features (for the price); I wasn't as attracted to it for its PHP or Mysql functionality but maybe later (so I went for WeBuilder rather than HtmlPad).

That said, there are a lot of requests to bring other languages into WeBuilder like ruby. It would seem that one direction to go would be some sort of syntax highlighting files. Textpad is an example of an editor that has been successful in allowing users to contribute syntax highlighting files which the editor can be configured to use. Beyond highlighting would be syntax completion (intellisense) for different languages; that seems pretty challenging, but would be attractive to many. Hardest and least doable would be contextual menus based on language. Right now WeBuilder has HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript contextual menus. I somehow think it would be tough to extend this to lots of specific languages.

charlesroper · Post by **charlesroper** » Fri May 26, 2006 10:50 am

Will, your comments about 'selling points' and Ruby on Rails ties in nicely with some points I've been thinking about, so I'll post them here.

I'm not sure the 'big' features really do help sell something like WeBuilder. These sorts of headline grabbing features may sell to the Dreamweaver crowd, but text based code editors are aimed at developers, not WYSIWYGers. If anything (and I speak from my own experience here), big flashy features put me off an app - it makes it look/feel bloated, gimmicky and everything I don't want a development and design environment to be.

For example, I'm far more impressed with the look and feel of TextMate when compared to RadRails. Judging by the relatively low profile of RadRails when compared to TextMate, I'd say developers generally agree. And, to in some way prove my point that understated, elegant, and highly customisable really does sell, look to TextMate as an example. Not only is it selling by the bucketload, a lot of people are switching to ($2000) Macs, just to be able to use TextMate to develop RoR apps. You only need to look at this article to see how many people are crying out for a TextMate for Windows. There's a huge gap in the market and I believe it's a market that works through word-of-mouth, not big features on a front page.

I agree that getting Ruby and Rails support in there is important (that's essentially Ruby syntax colouring along with RHTML, RJS, YAML, plus the ability to fire off external scripts and such). But rather than go the RadRails route of bloat, I'd implore Karlis and the gang to follow TextMate's lead of elegance instead. For a really good insight into some of the beatufully elegant approch TextMate takes, have a look at this review and DHH's (he's the creator of Rail) thoughts on it.

I've purchased WeBuilder as it's the app on Windows I see most potential for. It doesn't do everything I need, and does plenty I don't need so I still have to use jEdit for many tasks (including playing around with RoR, which I find much better than RadRails). But the potential is there and I want to support the development effort.

Bill - I agree with all your points and indeed, TextMate does the whole syntax highlighting thing brilliantly. Your contextual menus idea is served well by the Bundles feature in TextMate. Again, the key here is ability of the community to feed in and add to the functionality themselves.

Anyway, I've gone on enough now.

Cheers,

Charles

charlesroper · Post by **charlesroper** » Thu Sep 28, 2006 12:10 pm

Just checking to see if there's any news on the 'find matching tag or delimiter' feature?

ebarstad · Post by **ebarstad** » Thu Sep 28, 2006 8:30 pm

Hi Charles,

I don't know if this is what you mean, but if you select a starting html tag, right click, and choose "Select Tag Block" WeBuilder will highlight the entire tag block, effectively matching the tag.

Sorry if this doesn't answer your question.

charlesroper · Post by **charlesroper** » Thu Sep 28, 2006 9:12 pm

Hi Eric, thanks for the reply. I did know about that feature but it's not really what I'm after though. Edit: See the first post in this thread for a good description of what 'find matching tag or delimiter' so (and shouldn't) do.