Celedev Blog Archive

One feature that was missing to CodeFlow until now was true auto-completion of Lua code, i.e. code completion proposals appearing automatically as you type your code, without having to hit the esc key first. Automatic code-completion is probably one of the most important editor features for bringing more comfort and effectiveness to the code-writing experience, and it has been on my to-do list for some time.

And this is precisely the main new feature of the just-released CodeFlow v0.9.12. In this version, code completion proposals appear while typing code, and they can usually be validated with a minimum number of key presses: typically, when the appropriate completion is selected, you can just continue entering the code after the completed word, like in this short example.

And, if you don't like it, automatic code completion can be disabled in the application preferences.

On the debug side, the Lua command editor also features automatic code completion, but there is more: code completion the Lua command editor is now aware of the current callstack-context . What this means is that, when stopped on a breakpoint, you can very easily write commands containing local variables or other symbols available at the line where the selected callstack level is stopped, without worrying about not misspelling variables or method names, as those will be proposed by auto-completion.

And the code editor behavior in case of syntax error in a Lua file has been improved too: code completion now takes into account field and method names defined after the error location; syntax-aware selection, code coloring and variables highlights, all work in the whole source file in case of syntax error. All this is really useful, because transitory syntax errors are quite inevitable when writing code, or dynamically modifying existing code in live coding mode!

As usual, CodeFlow v0.9.12 can be downloaded from celedev's support page or by using the software-update check feature in CodeFlow.