Arachnophilia 5.3, new release

Joined : 03 Jan 2007 Posts : 3

Just saw, after three years, Arachnophilia has a new release (5.3) out.

For those of you with Eclipse and DreamWeaver it's nothing to get too excited about. A nice syntax highlighting editor, with a convenient macro language. You can tie into your development server, and up to six browsers. Written in Java, it is cross platform. Support was improved for PHP, in addition to ASP, C++, eiffel and of course Java and XHTML.

With a little playing around you can rewrite the menus, toolbars and commands to suit how you code. So there is more than just nostalgia as a reason to check it out. And It's a good (non-WYSIWYG) starter editor. You'll need JRE2 1.4 or greater installed to run Arachnophilia.

Working with the Macro Language

It's pretty straigthforward, but some things are not explicitly listed in help. For example, let's say you frequently shift between syntax and line wrap plain text. You could create such a command.

Should web examine Tools > List System Commands we find some promising clues.

[DisplayLineWrap] Toggle line wrapping in the plain-text display
[DisplayPlainText] Choose the plain text display

These are nice, but not enough. What if we could write a complex command to switch to plain, wrapped text. This is possible using the form:

[DisplayPlainText:DisplayLineWrap]

Assign this an icon in the Macro Editor Pane and you can make it a Toolbar Icon. Now you have a button which changes from syntax to wrapped plain text. This is merely an example. You may find [UserInput] and the vertical pipe | very handy to work into your commads. UserInput will pop up an input box. In this way you could have the program prompt you for image alt text or auto insert a caption underneath a floated image.

Guest

This forum seems a bit advance, what does all that mean?