IDE: problem copy code from editor

Richard_And_Trisha

when I try to paste to the objo code section here, or any text editor, all the formatting disappeared.

at first, I though I have problem with my clipboard and looking for a clipboard. turn out it only happen when I copy objo code to somewhere else

bgrommes

Richard_And_Trisha Objo (and Xojo) have what I call "opinionated" formatting. It doesn't matter how you enter code or how it looks when read from disk; it always formats it into the editor according to its own rules and also both products write it to disk with all leading spaces stripped from each line (not 100% consistent from what I have seen, but this appears to be a pretty close / fair description).

To mangle Dr. Seuss, "I do not like this, Sam I Am". I am not sure why it needs to be that way, because one bad side effect is that Git repositories receive this code with the non-indentation and it's hard to read the resulting diffs, at least in tooling outside of Objo's own Git support (which TBH I haven't explored yet).

I've never seen anyone mention this so I guess I get to be the one to break the silence. @Garry -- Would it be possible to at least format code in the Git-friendly format the same as it is in the Objo editors?

Richard_And_Trisha

bgrommes understood now... just that when I cut the sample code in the insert objo code block button, it is rather hard to see without the formatting.. I mean losing all the indentation

Select Case p_listbox
Case lstStatus, lstCategory, lstOwnershipProperty
Var v_IDs As String = p_listbox.CellTextAt(p_row, 2)
MyModule.g_WhereSQL = " RecordNumber IN (" + v_IDs + ")"
Var frm As frmResult = New frmResult
frm.ShowCentered()
Case lstRecentAdded, lstRecentChanged
Var v_ID As String = p_listbox.RowTag(p_row).ToString()
MyModule.g_RecordNumber = " RecordNumber = " + v_ID
Var frm As frmCollection = New frmCollection
frm.ShowCentered()
End Select

Bodevinaat

I think this is because Objo does not put any spaces or tab characters in the formatted text. So if you copy the text, it is totally unformatted.

Richard_And_Trisha

Bodevinaat understood. thanks

Garry

I've added support for this in the next release: https://feedback.objo.dev/feature/1201

Now when you copy code from Studio, the IDE will insert spaces to match the visual indentation the code editor displays. This ought to make pasting into external editors/forums prettier.

bgrommes

Garry Any possibility we could at some point have the git-friendly solution format preserve formatting at least when sending to Git? Preferably in the actual file though, because at present I have my Objo working code in Git along with my work corpus and it's seeing everything left-justified, making it difficult to read diffs. It is in Git simply because the Objo solution lives in the folder structure my local repository looks at. Objo is not in the mix at this point as far as doing commits, etc.

If the code looks readable (dare I say, beautiful?) in Git diffs, that can only help adoption of Objo.

Garry

Yes, that’s a fair point, and it’s separate from the clipboard change. The VCS-friendly solution format is intended to work well with ordinary Git tooling, so its .objobasic files should also be readable in external diffs.

Studio currently stores unindented source and calculates the displayed indentation itself. I’ll look at having VCS-friendly solutions write that calculated indentation into the source files, while keeping Studio’s internal editing and compilation behaviour unchanged. I’ll track this as a separate feature.

bgrommes

Garry Thanks for accepting this as a potential feature. A side effect is that the next Git check in after this change would cause changes to most lines of code already in the repository, but I think it's an acceptable one-time side effect.

A smaller but related issue is that if you comment out a block of code it also loses its indenting (of course it is restored when you uncomment it). Sometimes when testing various approaches to a problem I comment out a dozen lines of code and swap something else in for it and all 12 of those commented out lines are left-justified. I would suggest preserving their original indentation, both when requesting a block comment operation or when just prepending a comment character to an existing line of code.

Richard_And_Trisha

Garry Brilliant!! already try that out and it is working beautifully

Garry

@bgrommes: Here's the Feedback tracker for the feature: https://feedback.objo.dev/feature/1211