UNA 1.1 Released - "Live" Syntax Checking for D

[John A. De Goes]

Hi Paul,

Thanks so much for the feedback. If only more people took the time...

Paul D. Anderson Wrote:
> Two big problems and then one I couldn't get past. 1) It wasn't obvious how to get the system to recognize my existing files. 

You need to copy them into the project or use a version control plug-in. Currently, we don't support in-place editing of existing files, which is a limitation caused by the Collaborative Edition, but present also in the Personal Edition.

> And 2) when I ran the D compiler it exited with a cryptic error message, the gist of which was that it couldn't run.

Hmmm, not sure I've seen this before. Probably, D was expecting some arguments but not getting them.

> Neither of those were fatal problems -- any new IDE has a learning curve. But when I went to look for help the only options I found were an "about" dialog and a tip of the day. That was the one I couldn't get past. Uninstall.

Sure. We've heard this before and tried to do something about it in version 1.1. This is why we have preconfigured tools for 20 different languages, including D. All these tools have been tested and found to work with very recent versions of standard tools. They should work out-of-the-box for many languages. And in any case, they provide a list of examples from which to learn from.

> The product looks promising. I like the premise, although I'm working solo on my D projects. But it wasn't worth the cognitive effort. The controls were not intuitive (to me, but that's what intuitive means, right?) and there weren't help files or examples to bring me up to speed. 

Are you referring to the Tools interface, or something else? Again, anything you tell us will help us bring UNA to the point where you *will* want to use it.

> I'll keep checking on developments. If I were working on a collaborative project I'd spend more time evaluating it. But for now I'll stick with my text editor and batch files.

Sure, I understand. Now not to torment you, :-) but you're missing out on some really cool features, like incremental search (hold down spacebar and type -- caret will jump to the first occurrence of the text), a single search & replace interface that does everything (supports instantaneous searches across hundreds of files, find in current file/selection/open files/whole project, and of course regular expressions), seamless version control (whatever you do in UNA is mirrored in the version control system), source snippets (type main and hit Ctrl + I, and see what happens), auto-complete, block editing, beautiful D syntax highlighting (including nested comments), and lots more goodies.

Regards,

John