Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

51 responses

• 1 Matt Graf // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I would love to see sort of UML tool that would create a CFC with getters and setters.

• 2 Matt Graf // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Maybe this feature is already built and I just don’t how to do it, but I would like to be able get IntelliSense for some of the CF Frameworks for example when I type getModelGlue(). I would like to be able to see a list of function to choose from.

• 3 joel // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I'd love to have a code formatter. It's the major thing that keeps me using DW for most of my development.

• 4 Craig // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Shortcut combos for snippets please! Or am I missing them?

• 5 Jim Priest // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Me personally - I'd really like to see a bug fix fiesta before adding any new features...
  
  I wonder if Adobe will share the results of their IDE survery? :) I bet there are lots of good suggestions there!
  
  Glad to see you back!!! :)

• 6 Ben Nadel // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Forgive me if this is already there, but right-click on a CFInclude tag and get "Edit Include File" option. Changed the way I program (in Homesite)!

• 7 Brian Kotek // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Matt, I already built one: http://cfcstub.riaforge.org/

• 8 Tom Chiverton // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I know it's hard to do, but 'intellisense' for CFCs is the feature I miss most at the moment.

• 9 Erki Esken // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I want vertical/block text selection and editing. And smart indenting when pasting in block of code. TextMate does this very well and is a benchmark for me to judge other text editors.
  
  Also, proper support for spaces instead of tabs would be nice. That means convert from tabs-to-spaces (or vice versa), and all identation actions and above mentioned smart block paste inside indented line would work well when either spaces or tabs are used.

• 10 Anthony // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Some sort of a usable FTP and sFTP integration would be all I need... hopefully there is some way of making this happen.

• 11 Mark W. Breneman // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  @ Erki, check out "eclipse columns" I have used it for some time. (google it. It is a source forge project)
  
  @Mark, Source formatting, PLEASE... Maybe get Adobe to share their DW source formatting rules.

• 12 Jeff Gladnick // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  SnipEx is a great feature, and what would make it even better, is the ability to save the snippets locally, and then assign them a hotkey. Right now, you're forced to be connected, to to click on them.
  
  Its no good for off-grid development, but it is nice to be able to sync your snippets up with cfsnippets.

• 13 dragonbait // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  A little feature that could be added would be if you type chr( list out the available numbers and what they are for... most of us have the basics such as tab memorized... but it could be convenient..

• 14 Jeff Gladnick // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  that chr() thing would be a great idea, especially if it showed the chr code side by side with it's HTML rendered equivalent.

• 15 Dan Vega // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I second Jeff's request. Snipex is great but the ability to save a snippet locally and assign a hotkey would be a great feature! Thanks for all your hard work Mark!

• 16 Jeff // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Quote:<quote>Some sort of a usable FTP and sFTP integration would be all I need... hopefully there is some way of making this happen. </quote>
  
  I 100% agree with Anthony...that is the only thing keeping me in Homesite. If the FTP behaved exactly like Homesite's, I start switching over our whole development team to cfeclipse. A related behaviour that shold be addressed, when you dubble-click a file in FTP view, if the file is already opened, it shouldn't open another copy...it should jump you to your already-opened-document....again, like Homesite.

• 17 Henry // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  better cfscript support.
  
  framework view update to show the linked XML better.

• 18 noname // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I am just happy you're back! Updated dictionary? Just getting it to work bug free with the latest version of Eclipse is all I would ask for.

• 19 Jamie Jackson // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I already do sftp from Eclipse. I'll have to dig up my notes on how to do it, if I dont have them handy...

• 20 Trond Ulseth // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Hi Mark,
  
  Good to see you back in the saddle :)
  
  One thing I wish for, but I'm not sure would be possible without changes to the underlying Eclipse, is support for BOM marks. I've earlier "ranted" about it: http://trond.ulseth.no/index.cfm/2006/12/15/CFEclipse-and-missing-BOM-marks

• 21 Dom // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  @Ben - you have "Open/Create File" when you right-click in a <cfinclude>. This does what you want with an existing file, and let's you create a new one (as long as you've saved the file your working in).
  
  Following on from this point, it would be great if there was a "Browse" button if you right-click "Edit this tag" when in a <cfinclude> tag.

• 22 Rafael // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Mark, IntelliSense it's what I miss over CFEclipse

• 23 Brian Kotek // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  And true Intellisense is something that is going to be very hard to implement because CFEclipse doesn't know about mappings, custom tag paths, and all the rest. It also doesn't, and can't, know what methods a CFC actually ends up having in it because CFCs can be created dynamically (i.e. Transfer) or have methods added to them at runtime. Which is why I still think the root of the solution is for Adobe to embed a bare-bones version of the actual CF runtime into the IDE. In that case, the IDE could actually compile and run things on the fly and would then know everything that CF knows at runtime. I realize this would be complicated, and I have no idea how it would actually work under the hood, but at a high level this seems to be the only way to truly get what we're asking for.

• 24 Tom Chiverton // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  This is getting a bit OT, but I knew a Java developer who loaded the WebLogic J2EE server up into Eclipse's debug view.
  CF is Java too, so you might not need Adobe to do much (if all you want to do is compile a file).

• 25 Mark Drew // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  @Tom: Even if we did Load CF, only with CF8 can I run a function to get the metadata of a component WITHOUT actually running the constructors of that component.
  
  ANY editor should be able to do introspection but it should NOT run the code. I might do a solution to this in a two fold way:
  1) If there is ambiguity about which CFC a variable refers to, provide a way to resolve it for that file
  2) you would show only the functions that are within that CF file (and inherited ones I guess)
  
  That is it, no running code whilst typing thank you

• 26 Ron Stewart // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I know it's not a big deal but I would like to see a bit more control on syntax highlighting (e.g., comments in italics; SQL keywords in bold)...

• 27 Javier Julio // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  We are not picky Mark! Just glad to see you will get back in the swing of it. Now that I'm doing Flex development (with CF of course) I'm using Eclipse all the time. Love to see what you cook up for the next release!

• 28 Tom Lenz // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I too would like code formatting. I like the ones that do it as you type. But I think you'd have to be able to tell it "don't format these lines".
  I would also like columnar selection. It's not a big deal, because I don't need it that often, and when I do, I just use another editor that does it. But thanks for the tip Mark B. about columns4eclipse, I'll try that.
  I don't know what intellisense is, but what I'd like is that if you put your cursor on a method, like cfcX.methodX, there'd be a key combo or a context menu item that would open x.cfc in the editor and put the cursor at methodX.

• 29 DeForrest // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  THANK YOU for all you do for us with CFEclipse!
  
  I *would* like to see a behavior reinstated that's present for Eclipse 3.2
  and not for v3.3. When you drag an image out of the navigator pane
  to the CFEclipse editor window, it used to add an img tag with good
  references.. width, height, etc. If you drug a cfm file, you got a nice link
  to the file with location references. Now in both cases, it just views the
  object in a new editor window. I miss this capability... :-(

• 30 Lola LB // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  Code formatting, please! I like code properly indexed following syntax. It's a real pain in the rear end having to debug other people's code that line up almost all flush left regardless of whether there are nested blocks or not.

• 31 Goyuix // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I would like to see the whole editor refactored to rely on some form of the default text editor (and inherit many of the capabilities of it instead of reimplementing them - like line numbering...).

• 32 Jeff // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  I just thought of another one...code formatting. Especially in regard to CAPS. In Homesite & Dreamwaever you can make the tags and attributes CAP and the values lower, like this:
  
  <IMG SRC="pic.jpg" ALIGN="center">
  
  I don't believe this is possible with CFEclipse.
  
  thanks!

• 33 Jeff // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM

  For the FTP integration if you use http://www.aptana.com/ and install CFEclipse it might do what you want. Although I see you need to pay for SFTP now (I am still using the beta :)).
  
  Code formating would be great and help out a ton. I would like to see the intellisense for Fusebox and the other Frameworks just come with the download of CFEclipse . It's always a pain to setup in eclipse.
  
  Keep up the good work :)

• 34 Russ Johnson // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  Hey Mark,
  
  Something that I have been playing with lately in regards to coding is the textmate bundle for CF. Its not enough to get me away from CFEclipse, too many good plugins and a single environment is great! But there are some things that make coding in Textmate faster than coding in CFEclipse and Im not sure if you could implement or not. But the way the code hinting works, you can actually get it to output the entire tag with attributes for you, and then you can use the TAB key to jump between the quotes of the attributes. This makes coding without the mouse so fast!
  
  I think this screencast shows the behaviour: http://www.cftextmate.com/?page_id=8
  
  Thanks for the hard work!

• 35 Jim Priest // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  I've been tinkering with E (Textmate for Windows) and really like how it works (it uses the same bundles) but like you - can't leave my CFEclipse :) I have reproduced some of the functionality with either snippets or using AutoHotKey to get some of the same functionality. It works but it is a bit of hodgepodge.
  
  Ideally it seems like it would be nice if you could use existing bundles within Eclipse but I haven't turned up anything on Google looking for this...

• 36 Jay // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  I would love to see some type if integration so that you could start server instances with a multi-server environment in eclipse....similiar to how radrails does it for ruby on rails.
  
  Also a better way to remote copy over files from your local project to the remote server would be nice.

• 37 Tom Lenz // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  Thanks for the tip about e. It seems like they took some time to do a good re-think on some things.
  I have a few ideas for features, don't know if they'd be of general interest though. In MS Word, the status bar can show a number telling you what page you're on. What about something similar for writing code, only the status bar shows you what method you're in? Or maybe what other kind of block you're in, like which case of a switch or which cfif section you're in.
  Or what about a key stroke combo that would take you to the beginning of the next (or previous) method or block? Kind of like next word, but at a higher level.

• 38 John Farrar // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  Yes, at the top of my list would be these features.
  
  I would like to be able to add code hinting that wouldn't get overwritten if the core gets updated. Plugin style. Help files that worked as plugins would be great also.
  
  How about snippets that upload to service, not just download? Snippet library 2.0?
  
  It would be good to have (I hate saying this because CFE is my editor of choice after the CFStudio of days gone by... that was so programmable!) a more programmable CFE. (CFStudio had macros, buttons, and wildly functional .vtm files.) Granted, this is a wish list so this had to go in.
  
  (Three is my quota at this time.)

• 39 Seth Feldkamp // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  My wishlist:
  
  Code Folding
  - allow more than 10 or however many tags can be folded.
  - remember manually folded tags on a page, these are only folded while the page remains open.
  - code folding doesn't always work right, often my cffunction tags are not folded at all
  - add support for folding html tags, maybe javascript too?
  
  Working Sets
  I work in an environment where I am constantly leaving certain development projects to work on something more immediately important. I would like to be able to save the open files as a working set, and then a way to easily open all files in a working set. Also, I've had trouble deleting a working set (the definition, not the files).

• 40 Christine Davis // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  I would love some changes to code folding. When you add fold markers yourself it would be really cool if the app would remmeber them the next time you open the file. If we could add tags to fold to the fold settings that would be cool as well.

• 41 AO // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  The performance is bad on large pages with lots of tags. On a 100K cfm file it can slow to the point where each letter typed take a sec to appear in < brackets. Please fix that (never see it happening in Aptana JS highlighting) as it makes it very unusable. Thanks a lot!

• 42 Russ Johnson // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  @AO - 100k cfm files? I just did a search in every CF project I have on my box and the largest CFM or CFC file I have is 33k and most average between 8k - 11k. Why in the world would you have a file that big? Seems like some of that could be broken out a bit...

• 43 Tom Lenz // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  @Seth
  > I would like to be able to save the open files as a working set,
  > and then a way to easily open all files in a working set
  
  Have you tried mylyn?
  http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/

• 44 Tom Lenz // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  Without regard to feasibility:
  I think it would be nice to have selections work this way:
  For words, when you hover over them, some kind of mark appears, maybe at the upper left hand corner of roughly the rectangle containing the word. If you click on that mark, you select the whole word. This would be faster than double clicking. You could then drag the word to where you wanted it or do whatever else you would normally do with a selected word. There might be even different selection marks, depending on whether you want to select whole or part of for example st.field_foo.
  Similarly for entire lines. Instead of having to triple click, you could just click on a mark near the left edge somewhere.
  
  Another thing I think would be helpful is smarter auto-completion with closing tags. Instead of just stuffing the closing tag right next to the opening tag, if there was a non white space after the opening tag or non white space on the next line, the closing tag would be inserted on the next blank line, indented to the same level as the opening tag.

• 45 Jordan // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  It would be great to have cfscript parsing that actually worked. And having a smart parsing system where it can intelligently add closing tags like dreamweaver.
  
  Ex. <cfoutput>
  
  blah blah
  
  </cfoutput>
  
  And when editing the first cfoutput, it may put in a duplicate </cfoutput> tag

• 46 JP // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  Nobody wants to work on a large file, but sometimes it happens. I just inherited a project with a large file (1000 lines) that is almost unworkable (slow) in CFEclipse. When I type a character, it takes a second or two for for the character to echo to the screen. It would be nice to at least have a handle on what's going on with this.

• 47 James Buckingham // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  I hope I'm not too late with this one but I'd like the ability to add more than one scribble pad and switch between them quickly.
  
  So for example I could select either the one on my local machine or the one on our development server.

• 48 Edward Beckett // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  Has it been mentioned a hundred times before?
  
  Background Highlighting for CF Comments ...
  
  As trivial as it sounds ...
  
  I really like that feature ...

• 49 JP // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  The first thing that I would like to see addressed is the auto-close feature, which has two main problems:
  
  1. Most auto-close features cannot be turn off, even though the preferences appear to give you that ability.
  
  2. The implementation is terrible. The feature needs to be smarter about when to close things.
  
  I am always fighting the editor when I paste things like "#thisVar#" or anything with quotes around it, or when I simply type one of auto-close character at the end of something... when there's already a beginning character. These bugs make editing very frustrating, and because I spend 8 hours a day editing code, how nice would it be if I could just simply turn this feature OFF!!!! I truly miss using an editor that doesn't mess with your typing, or when it does, it does the right thing.
  
  Personally, I think these bugs rise to the level of highest priority because 1) there is no workaround, and 2) these bugs affect every single CFEclipse user out there. I would like to see a maintenance release to at least respect the users auto-close settings in the preferences, giving me the ability to turn it off.

• 50 Jeff Gladnick // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  @JP: I believe it CAN be turned off in the cfeclipse preferences, but I share your frustration about pasting ## or things inside of a '', and then having cfeclipse automatically insert an additional # sign. Perhaps it could be disabled if the person "pasted" but not when they type. I have create some bugs that way.

• 51 JP // Sep 22, 2008 at 4:14 PM

  If it can be turned off, please tell me how. I'm pretty sure this is a known bug. See ticket number 118, and this discussion:
  
  http://groups.google.com/group/cfeclipse-users/browse_thread/thread/89e53d197290cbea#