Multiple Selections, configurable auto-matching and JSHint integration

Hello and thank you for the suggestions.

We will add the suggestion for multiple selections and the quote auto-completion.  For that, do you mean auto-complete (you type one quote and it inserts the other) or just highlighting when you are next to one?

For JSLint, that is an idea we've had as well.  The problem is that I believe we would need to do web calls to invoke it, which would possibly drag down performance when the device has a bad network connection.  Are you aware of any pure .NET ways to invoke Lint that don't require network connectivity?

The custom language support feature is difficult in Windows Store apps due to us being restricted from loading any external .dlls (a Microsoft security policy for such apps).  It's not possible to do so at runtime since everything needs to be pre-compiled in. 

I'll log the multiple windows suggestion.

One thing we have considered is opening up our Code Writer source code into GitHub and looking for third parties to help extend it. I'm not sure what interest the developer community would have in that sort of thing.  But at least that way, it would make it easier to support third party languages.  Perhaps we could maintain the "official" branch of what goes into the Store and get the input/work of others selectively included from the public open source repo.

Yes, auto-complete meaning you type one quote, it automatically inserts the other.

Not sure if this fits your needs, but it might be worth investigating, if only as a starting to know where to look next: http://jslintnet.codeplex.com/

For custom language support, other editors seem to have ways to specify custom grammars without baking them into the compiled code:

• http://manual.macromates.com/en/language_grammars
• http://www.apeth.com/nonblog/stories/textmatebundle.html
• http://sublime-text-unofficial-documentation.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/syntaxdefs.html

Open sourcing sounds like a great idea. I imagine developer interests would be fairly small in scale, considering how few people actually use Windows RT as a coding platform, but it can certainly help in terms of attracting attention.

Also, another suggestion to add while I have your attention: Sublime Text does this thing where it remembers variable names and key or unusual phrases that have been typed in the document thus far, and allowing a loose form of autocomplete when typing. It saves a boat load of time. This would be a great addition and I think it would be fairly easy to implement in a language agnostic manner.

Hello,

We will mark down the .NET JSLint wrapper you mentioned and can eventually see if it is WinRT compatible, or at least if it can be made to be so.

We do actually already have a .langdef text format for setting up core syntax highlighting that our SyntaxEditor control supports where it's all pattern based.  Perhaps that is something we could add support for.  It's just that advanced features like parsing, etc. wouldn't be supported for custom languages since those sorts of things require .NET code to be written for their support.

Our completion list for the JavaScript language has logic similar to what you were saying Sublime does where it combines all the language keywords and identifier values that have been found to provide a loose form of auto-complete.  We will log the request for this to be made more generic.  Which languages in particular are you looking to add it to?

Hello,

I wanted to let you know that quote auto-completion is being added for the next version.