The following is a wish-list of enhancements. Some of these date back to before the
release of version 9. This version has been spell-corrected :)
The order of these requested features in no way reflects their preference rank,
they're just "randomly" listed.
1) Allow a user to select whether EOL comments (either individually or all four as a group)
syntax highlights stop with the last visible character on the line, or if the
background extends to the entire visible width of the window.
(for example see http://www.planetolsen.com/other/multiedit/eol_comments.html)
2) Similarly, please allow a user to select whether block comments (either
individually or both as a group) syntax highlights the background of the entire block,
including 'empty' lines.
(for example see http://www.planetolsen.com/other/multiedit/block_comments.html)
3) Allow a total of four block comments, each with distinct syntax highlighting
options.
4) Allow other line delimiter combinations in addition to DOS, Unix, and Binary;
such as for Macintosh (just \r), and other user maintained lists of
delimiter patterns to choose from. I also have situations were I'd love to be
able to designate a pipe as a line delimiter.
Note: ACI said on 1/18/2002 that supporting multiple line delimiters within
a single file is planned in next major release (which I would guess would
be MEW 10. Given 9 took a year to get out, I would
expect this release in 2003 or 2004). I do not know yet if this means a file
can have DOS and UNIX line terminators mixed together, or if 'multiple' means
new line-delimiter types will be added as well, such as Macintosh and pipe
(or anything else people want to throw at it)
http://www.multiedit.com/webbbs/multiedit/index.cgi?read=7931
Update on this from Dan: need to get id number
5) Make it easy for those non-macro-knowledgeable people to change the EOL comment
# to use for the COMMENT macro. It is currently set to 1. It would be nice to
use EOL Comment #3, instead of EOL Comment #1, for example. Why not just move
EOL comment #3 to #1? Well, PERL only has one character for an EOL comment,
the # symbol. But, I want #_# to be syntax'd differently than ## which I want
syntax'd different from #. But if I put # in EOL comment 1, I'll never get the
other syntaxes to appear, since it will match on #1.
I've submitted to the support forum some time ago a slightly revised commenting
macro to allow a user to easily change the EOL comment used (from the defined 1
through 4) to comment lines when the macro is invoked. However, it would be
nice to be able to select this via a radio button or something within the
language preference.
6) To be able to look at a tab delimited file and have all the columns line up
without setting the tabs to like 500 characters, which effectively lines up
the columns (assuming none of the fields are longer than 500 characters) but
it makes viewing the file extremely awkward, at best, since you can't get a
good visual representation of your file since you can only look at any one
field at once.
I wrote a macro to do this, it's still in alpha stages.
Version 1.0.1 (2002-09-17) can be downloaded at
http://www.planetolsen.com/other/multiedit/align_tabs.s
7) To have an option to soft-wrap text to any or all of the following: Window
width (dynamic as window is resized), fixed width via language (maybe right
margin setting), or ruler.
It would be really nice to wrap a file within a window without embedding
literal linefeeds/carriage returns into the file.
Note: ACI said on 1/18/2002 that soft-wrap is planned in next major release,
which I would guess would be MEW 10. Given 9 took a year to get out, I would
expect this release in 2003 or 2004.
http://www.multiedit.com/webbbs/multiedit/index.cgi?read=7931
8) To be able to disable the "auto-save" for a given file, like scratch files,
yet still auto-saving the other files in memory.
9) If there could be an option that if a file has been browsed/scanned for tags,
it would be nice if the name of tagged subroutine/function the cursor is
currently in would appear somewhere in the editing environment, like on the
status bar. Like in Perl or C, if you are in a subroutine named "new { xxxx }"
and your cursor is on xxxx, it would show "current function: new" somewhere.
10) Add two more functions to the dialog that pops up for the "file has changed
on disk" message. The valid choices currently are "yes" or "no" to reload
the changed file. It would be really cool to have two more choices: 1) Load
the changed file without replacing the old file -- perhaps by renaming old
file. That way you can manually "merge" the files. 2) To be able to
"compare" the two, line-by-line, to see the changes.
11) Let saves and auto-saves be non-blocking. For example, when saving files over
a slow connection (even a cable modem), saving large files can take 30+
seconds. It would be nice to continue to edit the file or other files during
this process instead of having to twiddle my thumbs or pull up something
mundane like solitaire when all I really want to do is get back to editing
my programs and templates. For example, when "save" is executed" a snapshot
of the current state of the file could be made and it is the snapshot that
is saved to disk, and any new changes won't be saved until the next save is
issued and the process is repeated.
12) When using the collapse text feature, please add an option to let the user
choose if the line numbers displayed in the main editing window reflect
the original line numbers instead of the line numbers relative to the collapsed
sections.
(see http://www.planetolsen.com/other/multiedit/collapsed_text_line_number.html)
13) Allow (via macro source at least) the user to change the character that
operates as the tab character. That is, I would find quite a few uses for
this feature within my macro (see item #6) to support tabs-within-quotes
and comma-delimited files.
On a file load I could switch all non-quoted tabs to char 254 (for example)
and then set char 254 to be the tabs. That would allow people to view/edit
the file, and typing tab still insert tabs (embedded tabs). On save, the
'alternate' tabs would be switched back to the real things. This would also
allow me to view/edit comma-delimited files instead of tab-delimited.