To help on this situation, user Charles Roper has made an rss feed tracking the e updates:

http://feed43.com/e-texteditor-releases.xml

Add it to your feed reader and you will get automatically notified when new updates are released.

In earlier versions of e, this could also be approximated with various shell plug-ins, but having it as an integrated part of e removes the reliance on external tools and gives a much nicer user experience. Implementing this features was also an opportunity to re-architect and improve a part of e that had gone a bit stale while the rest of the editor had evolved. The new underlying project framework is very flexible and extensible, and will allow for a lot of new capabilities in the near future.

To open a remote project just select ‘File/Open Remote Folder’ on the menu, create a new profile and press ‘Open’. The remote site will be opened in the project pane, and you can interact with it as if it was a local project.

You can also open remote files and projects directly from the command line. You just have to give it the path i url format:

e.exe ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/dir/file.txt
e.exe ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/dir/ (remember trailing slash for projects)
e.exe ftp://username:password@ftp.mydomain.com/dir/ (with login)

The remote projects feature is still very new and currently only supports the ftp, but support for protocols like sftp and webdav will be available soon.

After a long beta period, e is finally coming out of beta. It has been quite a ride. We have had a pretty crazy release cycle with updates coming out weekly (and often twice a week). So I really appreciate all the users who have followed the releases and pushed both me and e to improve with their enthusiasm. Special appreciation goes to all those users who chose to register even though it was still in beta.

Coming out of beta does not mean that development will slow down. The 1.0 release is a stable base to build on and I have a lot of new (and unique) features in the pipeline. I will probably start having a bit longer between releases to focus on some larger features.

And before I get drowned in requests again. Yes, a linux version is in the works

As an example of what is possible, and how easy it is to create interactive dialogs, I have created a bundle command version of the excellent Visibone Color Lab.

The modifications to the original html code is really minor. Mainly just moving some frames around and making it update on mouseOver. The interesting part comes where i modify it to return the color code when a color is clicked:

<area HREF=”cocoadialog://%23FFFFFF” onMouseOver=”pick(’FFFFFF’,'W’,'White’)” SHAPE=”POLYGON” COORDS=”184,200,202,168,221,200″>

By giving it a link with the protocol defined as “cocoadialog”, I instruct it to react on a click by closing the dialog and returning the links content (notice the url encoding for the # mark).

To make this into a bundle command, I just have to open the Bundle Editor and create a new command containing the following two lines:

cd "$TM_SUPPORT_PATH/Visibone"
CocoaDialog html --title "The 216-Color Webmaster's Palette" --html-from-file big.html --width 380 --height 542

By first setting the current working dir to the location of the html files (and images), I ensure that the dialog can find all it’s files.

I then set input to “None” and output to “Replace Selected Text”, so that the color code will be inserted in the text when a user clicks a color.

I hope that this has illustrated how easy it is to make html dialogs. Since you have full access to using javascript in your html, there is really no limit to how freeform and interactive you can make it.

Thanks to the kind permission of Bob Stein, the Visibone creator, I have been able to include the color lab in the latest update of e. You can find it as “Insert websafe color” in the HTML bundle.

Nothing can improve your ability to manipulate text as much as learning Regular Expressions, and it is not just in your editor. Just about any modern programming language support them, so you can greatly enhance your productivity and understanding of code by learning them.

The following screencast gives an introduction to the basics of regular expressions and shows how you can use them in your editor. The best way to learn is just playing around with them and watching the interactive feedback.

I have included a cheatsheet that you can use as a quick reference, and to expand your knowledge of Regular Expressions. I recommend that you print it out and gradually expand your comfort zone by trying out more and more features.

Ben Kittrell has written a straightforward how-to guide on creating the ideal Windows environment for Ruby on Rails development:

A Mac-esque Rails Development Environment on Windows

]]> http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/ruby_on_rails_on_windows/feed http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/transpose_the_multitool http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/transpose_the_multitool#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2007 21:56:23 +0000 Alexander Stigsen http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2007/transpose_the_multitool Transpose is a versatile command that can save you a lot of typing. What it does is to ‘reverse the order of things’, but what makes it really useful is the fact that what it reverses depends on the context:

• If the caret is inside a word, the chars on each side of the caret are swapped, and the caret is moved to after the right char. This makes for a quick way to fix typing mistakes.

• If the caret is between two words, the words are swapped.

• If the caret is at the beginning of a line, the line is swapped with the line above. Similarly if the caret is at the end of a line, the line is swapped with the line below. This makes for an easy way to move lines up and down through the document.

• If there is a selection, the contents is reversed.

• If there are multible selections (made by holding down ctrl while selecting), the selections are swapped.

• If there is a column selection (made by holding down alt while selecting), the order of items in the entire column is reversed.

You can access it from the menu, but to really make it a timesaver, I would recommend making it a habit to use it’s shortcut Ctrl-T.

Some users have noticed that the new site was lacking any reference to the collaboration features. I still have a lot of plans for the collaboration and revision control features. But at right at this stage it was diverting from the current focus on TextMate compatability. I early had the realization that no matter how powerful I made the rcs features, they would never really get used if the basic editing features weren’t up to scratch. So the main focus now is to get the TextMate compatibility complete and stable.

I will actually be removing the collaboration features for a time. They will come back in a much more powerful version when the TextMate features are stable.

This was a fine strategy when e was supposed to be simple editor, tightly focused on collaboration, which would be quickly out of beta. But the introduction of TextMate bundle support largely increased the scope and ability of the program, and greatly extended the beta period.

Based on thoughtful feedback from many users (many of whom had bought their own licenses), I have decided to make it possible to keep using the program beyond the trial period. This will stay possible for as long as the program is in beta state.

When you register e, the license is bound to you, and not to one specific computer. This means that you can use you license on as many computers as you like. There is also no limit on platforms, so it will also be valid on future versions for Linux or any other OS.

The license is valid for one year (time in beta does not count). After that minor updates are free but there will be an upgrade fee for major updates (2.0).

There is no greater encouragement than when users show that they like the program enough to buy it. So to show how much I appreciate those who do register while it is still in beta, all licenses being bought during the beta period will be extended to include the next major update + one more year of free updates.