Our Early Access Program for MPS 2020.2 has started, and the latest version brings a new set of features that we’re excited to introduce. DOWNLOAD MPS 2020.2 EAP   UI improvements to the VCS We’ve improved the windows in the Version Control System. The width of the editor area is no longer fixed, so the splitter now moves in both directions. The way changes are highlighted has also been improved. Additionally, we have replaced the triangles and trapezoids in the splitter area with smooth polygons. Tooltips for the changes are displayed both in the editor area and in the splitter a

Here's a brief announcement of an upcoming feature that we would like to know your opinion on. One of the more visible changes that we’re preparing for 2020.1 is a set of enhancements to BaseLanguage that have been inspired by the Java language.  You can look forward to: try with resources catch multiple exceptions string switch natively supported in the generated code local variable type inference In order to support these features, the minimal source code language level for the generated Java code in MPS will be raised to Java 7. We believe that after so many years of Java 6

Little progress can be made without honest feedback. The MPS online documentation was migrated to a new JetBrains platform earlier this year. Along the way, the MPS team has been putting effort into making the documentation more complete and up-to-date. To move forward with the documentation, we need your help: If you fail to find documentation for a certain feature. If you discover wrong or misleading information. If you think some text or image is obsolete or inaccurate. If you’d like to suggest improvements or want to contribute a piece of text. If you come across anything l

Deprecated code smells like rat. It is not a good sign to be using deprecated code in a projects for several versions. Here are a few tips that show how MPS can help you get rid of deprecated code. The handy migrations The Migration menu contains a Deprecated Code submenu with three migrations. The action Find Usages of Deprecated is undoubtedly the most useful one if you want to eliminate usages of deprecated code. It will find all usages of deprecated elements in your project. The report of the found usages can, as one of the options, group the entries by the expected version of code re

This is one recent feature that perhaps deserves some more popularization - jetbrains.mps.baselanguage.logging has been enhanced with two logging statements, which replace the now deprecated logging statements like error, warn, info and others: message outputs a logging message into the MPS Messages view and so provides a very convenient instant way to trace your code. If multiple projects are open in MPS, an optional project parameter can be used to target the Messages view of a particular project. log forwards a logging messages to the log4j library using the configuration in $MPS_HOME

The guys of DSLFoundry have brought my attention to the MPS-plaintextgen plugin recently. The plugin offers a language that models textual documents as collections of lines and words, supports layouts, alignment and indentation, and in addition to that, it comes with decent editing experience built in. The binaries of the plugin can be obtained from the JetBrains plugin repository. The language is primarily meant to be used in generators to ease transformation of complex models into text. Unlike with the TextGen aspect in MPS, the plaintextgen language allows you to leverage the model-to

Here's another handy new little feature in 3.4 that we want to introduce to you - the Icon description language. This language helps describing and instantiating icons for various MPS elements: concepts, actions etc. Again, mbeddr has inspired us here, namely their iconchar language. The langage has two aims: 1. Allow for quick icon prototyping (e.g. making new icons for concepts) 2. Make icons an extensible language construct rather than an ad-hoc solution, which it was before First impression Wherever an icon is expected in the MPS language definition languages, you can enter a textua

The new visual assistance tools that were explained in one of the previous posts are really addictive. We could not help it and, to test the feature properly, we implemented Context Assistant for the language definition languages. More concretely, the structure and the editor languages leverage the mechanism in order to offer you the actions that you are most likely to invoke at any moment during the language design. There’s even some heuristics implemented, which can offer non-trivial actions in some situations, You should definitely check out this quick video to find out more. The

MPS has been searching gradually over several releases for the best way to approach explicit generation plans and cross-model generation. MPS 3.4 represents another substantial step in this direction. It brings two major enhancements: Debug information in checkpoint models Using DevKits to associate a generation plan Debug information in checkpoint models When a model is being generated following a generation plan, the content of mapping labels will be preserved during the plan’s checkpoints in so called checkpoint models. These checkpoint models are visualized in the Project View

There are two new features in MPS 3.4 that I would like to drive your attention to today - the Context Assistant and the Context Actions Tool. Both have been inspired by the mbeddr project and both aim at making code editing easier and more intuitive, especially for novice users. Making the most relevant editing options explicitly visible to the user and accessible with mouse is part of our long-term strategy to make the MPS DSLs approachable for people outside of the narrow rank of professional developers. Context Assistant Context Assistant provides visual hints directly in the editor

One of the major enhancements that you’ll get with MPS 3.4 is the new Transformation Menu Language. This is meant as a replacement and a major improvement over the functionality of Side-transformations and Node substitutions, which have been deprecated and will be removed from MPS in one of the next versions. (Don’t worry, a semi-automated migration will be provided.) Additionally, the very same language can be used to define any other editor-related context-aware actions, such as the new Context Assistant or Context Actions Tool. I’d like to clarify the rationale behind this new functiona

The feature set for MPS 3.3 is now complete. We've prepared an MPS 3.3 EAP 4 release wrapping all the new features so as you could test them out before we do the final polish. Especially you could pay attention to the newest additions: Collapse by default - collection editor cells can now appear collapsed (folded) by default and thus reduce the unnecessary visual clutter that a user has to fight when using a your language. Paste from history - the MPS clipboard now maintains a history of copied nodes and when pasting with Control/Cmd + Shift + V the user can choose, which item from the h