Several weeks ago, we announced a new Delimiter Auto-Complete feature coming to the 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor for WPF and Silverlight.  This feature is great because it improves typing efficiency by auto-inserting end delimiters when the start delimiter is typed.

We have been wanting to improve the typing experience even more and in today's post, I'd like to announce that curly brace auto-indent is also coming.

What Is Curly Brace Auto-Indent?

When the caret is in the middle of a curly brace pair, pressing Enter normally will move the close curly brace to the next line with the caret right in front of it.  If you have an indent provider for your language, the close curly brace will be indented properly however it's still not an ideal situation because you generally want the caret to be on its own line before the close curly brace's line.

This scenario is where curly brace auto-indent comes in!  This feature injects a new blank line in between the braces, indents one more level, and positions the caret on that line.

Sample Usage

Let's start with a regular JavaScript function declaration.  Note how the caret in in between a curly brace pair.

In the past, if you pressed Enter, you'd get this:

With the new curly brace auto-indent feature, instead of the above when you press Enter, you will get now this:

The end user is immediately able to start typing content for the function.

Summary

These new features will be available in the 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor, and are built into our advanced C# and JavaScript languages for this version.

They can easily be added to any custom language as well with a few lines of code.

In today's post I'd like to announce another new feature coming to the 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor for WPF and Silverlight:  indentation guides.

What are Indentation Guides?

Indentation guides are subtle vertical lines that render at each tab stop on lines prior to the first non-whitespace character.  They help visually align the indentation of visible code blocks.

You can see the silver indentation guide lines in the tab stops within this screenshot:

Whitespace-only lines are intelligent and render indentation guides based on the tab stop level of surrounding text.

Summary

These new features will be available in the 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor!

One great thing about having our free Code Writer Windows 8 text/code editing app out is that we now get a lot of feedback directly from end users of the SyntaxEditor control.  Normally we only receive feedback from our own customers, who are developers integrating SyntaxEditor and our other UI controls into their own apps.

What is Delimiter Auto-Complete?

A common request we've received is to support delimiter auto-complete.  Delimiter auto-complete is where the user types a start delimiter and a related end delimiter is auto-inserted after the caret.  This is especially helpful when working on mobile tablets like a Surface since it means less overall typing is required to output the same code.

The 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor for WPF and Silverlight includes a built-in implementation of delimiter auto-complete via a language service that can be customized and assigned to any syntax language.

Sample Usage

In this example, we'll use our new advanced JavaScript language, also coming in the 2013.2 version and described further in this post.

First, we'll type a ( character:

You can see how the related end ) is also auto-completed and the caret remains in the middle of the two delimiters. 

Now if I type a ) character, it recognizes that this end delimiter was auto-completed, and instead of making another text change, skips right over the previously auto-completed end delimiter.

Now if I type another ), it will insert a new character since it recognizes we are now outside of the auto-completed delimiter range.

Let's delete that extra end delimiter and type an open curly brace to see the resulting auto-completed close brace:

Say I made a mistake and wish to quickly delete the pair.  If I press Backspace then it recognizes I'm backspacing over a delimiter that created an auto-complete and it removes the completed end brace as well. 

That's neat stuff!

Summary

These new features will be available in the 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor!

In our last post, we revealed that a new advanced implementation of the JavaScript language is being added to the Web Languages Add-on in the 2013.2 version.

In this post we'll look at which features will be part of the language's first release.

Syntax Highlighting

As with all our other syntax languages, a lexer tokenizes the code and allows for colorization of items such as keywords, comments, strings, etc.  This makes code much easier to read.

Parsing

A full parser that conforms to the ECMAScript 5.1 standard is included.  The parser runs in a worker thread, and even handles things such as implicit semi-colon insertion.

AST Generation

The parser outputs a complete abstract syntax tree (AST) of the document.  This AST is stored with the document and can be traversed to view the JavaScript code structure.

Syntax Error Reporting

Errors in syntax are returned by the parser and can be displayed in error lists.  In addition, squiggle lines are rendered under the errors and mouse hovers over the squiggles reveals the error description.

Code Outlining

All JavaScript functions are code outlined so that they may be collapsed (folded).  The outlining margin helps the end user by providing some visual structure to the code.

Smart Indent

Pressing Enter at the end of a line indents properly on the next line.

Text Formatting

A text formatter is included that beautifies JavaScript code.

Code Block Selection

Use Ctrl+Num+ and Ctrl+Num- to expand and collapse the text selection over the ancestor statement/block/function hierarchy.  This sort of functionality is described in detail in this post.

Delimiter Auto-Complete

A new feature (being added in 2013.2 with support for all languages) allows for delimiter auto-complete.  For example, this means that when you type a ( character, the end ) character is inserted immediately after the caret for you.

Summary

The advanced JavaScript language will be added to the Web Languages Add-on in the 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor!

Great news… a new language add-on for JavaScript, specifically the ECMAScript 5.1 standard, is coming to SyntaxEditor.  Let's take a first look:

In this screenshot, you can see features like syntax error reporting and code outlining active.  This new language will allow you to instantly plug in an advanced JavaScript editing experience to your apps that use SyntaxEditor.

The advanced JavaScript language will be added to the Web Languages Add-on in the 2013.2 version of SyntaxEditor!