editor

The release train for final MPS 3.4 has set off. Having incorporated your feedback to the EAP releases, we've just made the first release candidate available for download. Please grab MPS 3.4 RC1, try it out and tell us, how satisfied you are with it. As usual, the What's new page sums up briefly the things new in MPS 3.4 with respect to version 3.3. You might also like to look over the few recent posts on the MPS blog to read about the new most noteworthy features in more detail. The Drive to Develop -JetBrains MPS Team

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

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

One of the neat enhancements that has been implemented in MPS 3.1 is the ability of the editor to automatically re-resolve broken or out-of-scope references. Imagine, for example, that you refer to a field from a piece of BaseLanguage code, e.g. from a method body.       Highlighting the field's usages (Control/Cmd + Shift + F7) confirms that the reference points to the field declaration. If, at this point, you introduce a parameter to the method with the same name, the field declaration gets moved out of the scope, since the parameter hides it. The referen

Here's a useful tip for presenting with MPS - since version 3.1 MPS supports presentation mode, in which the editor occupies the whole screen real-estate. No tool-bars, no tool panels and no menus. Just code. Plus the Appearance configuration screen in Project settings allows you to pre-set a different font size for presentation mode. To switch to the presentation mode, either use the Toggle Presentation mode action in the Invoke action dialog (Control/Cmd + Shift + A), or use the Enter/Exit Presentation Mode item in the View menu.    Good luck presenting with MPS! Deve

Projectional editors have always fallen behind plain text ones when it came to manipulating parentheses in expressions. Adding a single parenthesis would turn the AST invalid and thus you had to add both parentheses at the same time through actions or intentions in order to preserve the AST structure. Not all is lost on the usability front, fortunately. As a small teaser for the upcoming MPS 3.1, check out this short video on parentheses projectional editing and see how parentheses editing in BaseLanguage has been enhanced. Develop with pleasure! -JetBrains MPS Team

Have you tried one of the most prominent features of MPS 3.0 - multiple editor projections? Developers can now switch between alternative notations and so always pick the one that fits best the task at hands. This is really an exciting addition to the MPS feature set. To help you start experimenting, we bundled a new multipleProjections sample project with MPS 3.0 EAP releases. This sample comes with a simplified state-machine definition language that offers two notations - a structural and a tabular one. Exploring the project will teach you how multiple notations can be implemented. We've al

Today we've got another video giving you a taste of what's being prepared for the upcoming 3.0 release - multiple editor projections. This is truly unleashing the power of projectional editing. The new support for multiple projections will give the language designers the power to define alternative editors and so prepare different ways for the users to interact with their code. These editors can be created for new as well as existing languages. The language users will then be able to choose the most appropriate editor for the job and switch between the alternative editors whenever needed.

Here's a short video showing some of the new capabilities of the MPS BaseLanguage (Java) editor coming in 3.0. Based on the feedback we received from many of our users, we put extra effort into making the editor feel like a textual one in many aspects. Namely: there are no visual placeholders for extended classes and implemented interfaces you can create fields and methods just by typing many of the class, field or method modifiers, such as final, static and abstract can be entered and removed in more intuitive ways switching among IfStatements, WhileStatements, Do-WhileStatements and For

The JetBrains TV site now hosts two new introductory screen-casts loaded with practical tips and tricks that aim to help people start using MPS effectively. While the first demo describes how to work with the MPS editor, the second one illustrates ways to run your solutions either from within MPS or integrated into a Java solution. If you are an MPS freshman and want to get useful tips, check them out. Develop with pleasure! -JetBrains MPS Team