Oolite Bulletins

Svengali wrote:

Personally I don't see a need for a plist editor at all. [wiki]Oolite_Converters[/wiki] has a nice Python script to convert XML plists to NextStep. I'm converting all XML plists in all used OXPs this way.

NextStep, GNUstep, OpenStep.. problem is, they're all utterly unloved in the real world, so far as I can tell.. I've yet to find an editor with plugins for any of them. If we want it, we're gonna have to create the plugin ourselves, by the looks.

Diziet Sma wrote:

they're all utterly unloved in the real world, so far as I can tell.

They are native on the mac were almost everything seems to be stored in plist format. And as Oolite was originally developed on the mac, the plist was the logical choice.

Oh, I'm not complaining.. merely making an observation.. Sadly, the far-and-away best editor on the Mac, Textmate, -even though the source has been released now- will probably never be ported to any other platform, because it is so dependent on Cocoa. GNUstep is at best a poor substitute for Cocoa.

E-Text Editor was a passable Textmate-like editor for Windows at least, (although it needed Cygwin for much of its functionality) and it could use many Textmate plugins. The creator had promised to port it to Linux at some point, as E-Text Editor had borrowed much of its ability from Linux. Unfortunately, it seems to have vanished. The domain is still there, but all attempts to access the website are blocked.

That leaves the best alternative editors as Notepad++ for Windows (and Linux, via WINE), and Sublime Text 2 for Mac/Windows/Linux. But neither of them has plugins we could use for Oolite. I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering trying to make a plugin for one or both of them, but I'd have a helluva lot to learn along the way.

El Viejo wrote:

Who let the penguins loose in here?

LOL - we just waddled in .

Edit: I must be missing something fundamental about property list files, but from what I can tell, I can load and edit the files just fine in my favorite text editor, although there is not syntax highlighting for non-xml plist files (not sure what syntax things like planetinfo.plist or shipdata.plist use, but there is no highlighting that I'm aware of for those files)

Certainly the openstep format is simple enough that setting a general purpose programmer's editor to treat them as JS or C files gives reasonable auto-indent and some syntax highlighting, though there are a couple of easy mistakes you can miss this way. A built-in syntax checker would be nice.

CommRLock78 wrote:

I must be missing something fundamental about property list files, but from what I can tell, I can load and edit the files just fine in my favorite text editor

But than you don't have anything more than a text editor. e.g. the basic plist editor on the mac looks like:



It is completely independent of the format. On saving you choose if it should be open step, XML or a binary format. You can't make syntax errors and you can copy or drag complete structures to a higher or lower position without worrying if you selected the syntactic correct group.

The only problem I have with it, is that it does not support comments. They are skipped on reading a file and lost on re-saving. That is the main reason I still use texteditors for some plist.

Eric Walch wrote:

CommRLock78 wrote:

I must be missing something fundamental about property list files, but from what I can tell, I can load and edit the files just fine in my favorite text editor

But than you don't have anything more than a text editor. e.g. the basic plist editor on the mac looks like:

It is completely independent of the format. On saving you choose if it should be open step, XML or a binary format. You can't make syntax errors and you can copy or drag complete structures to a higher or lower position without worrying if you selected the syntactic correct group.

The only problem I have with it, is that it does not support comments. They are skipped on reading a file and lost on re-saving. That is the main reason I still use texteditors for some plist.

Quite a pretty interface, but, no commenting is not any good .

I just noticed that two different shipdata.plist files had two different formats (xml and open step). I've selected the openstep files to use C highlighting in my text editor, as Cim suggested.

In the course of further searching, I came across a Perl script which says it "converts .plist files between binary and UTF-8 (editable) text formats."

No idea as to how well it works or how useful (or not) it may be.. (probably not much, I guess, as Oolite doesn't use binary plists) just letting it be known that it exists.


http://scw.us/iPhone/plutil/