IDE hard to read. « LeafLabs Garden

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IDE hard to read.

(6 posts) (3 voices)

Started 3 years ago by
Latest reply from pico

Anonymous
Unregistered

Hello, I'm new to the Maple platform and not yet up to speed on the programming language. Recently I have only used Visual Basic but many years ago I did limited programming in assembly language. Only as a hobby. I have never taken the time to learn C.

I am using the 64-bit Version of Windows 7.

The problem I'm having is my limited eyesight. The fonts on the Language editor is way too small and thin for me to use the program properly. I have gone to properties and increase the size of the font but this only increases the font size for the main program not for the debug window. Even with the increased size of the font the fonts are still skinny and hard to read. Is there something that can be done to improve the readability of the editor. I am having to use the Visual Studio editor to edit the program and then cut and paste to The Maple compiler editor. but this does nothing for the debug window. The error messages are colored red and become unreadable even with a magnifying glass. This makes it Difficult to tell where the bugs are. they only become readable after highlighting.

I would appreciate any help that you can give on this problems.

Thank you.

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

I tidied up the double post. Can't help with your actual problem, sorry.

(Full disclosure: I am not a member of LeafLabs staff.)

Posted 3 years ago #
pico
Member

Instead of cutting and pasting from one editor to another, you can tick the "use external editor" checkbox in the file|preferences menu. Edit your source code in the editor of your choice, and just make sure to save to disk from whichever editor you are using before hitting the "build" button on the IDE -- everything will be loaded off the disk into the IDE just before the compile to get everything in sync.

That should help with eliminating the cutting and pasting. As for the small font error messages -- possibly trickier. The IDE is written in Java, and the font size may be hard-coded (a lot of stuff that probably shouldn't be is hard-coded in the IDE, but that's the legacy of the original Arduino IDE code base, unfortunately.) That's the bad news. The good news it may be relatively straightforward to amend the code and recompile a version of the IDE with your personal font size/color selection. You'd have to pull down a copy of the source (links on this website I believe) and follow the build instructions -- I've never done this, so I don't know how difficult this is to do in practice. But in theory everything is open source and modifiable.

Posted 3 years ago #
Anonymous
Unregistered

Thanks to all that replied.

Unfortunately, I do not know anything about Java Other than it was created by Adobe for use with the Internet as a portable platform, And it's based on the C language. Other than that I'm lost.
this is going to be more difficult than I thought. Having to learn the Maple platform, C and C++ programming languages and Now Java. I know they're all related but the differences can be overwhelming for Someone who's never dealt with these languages before.

well there's only one thing to do, start reading And hope I can make sense of it all.

Thanks for the help.

Posted 3 years ago #
gbulmer
Moderator

promacjoe - FYI Java was not created by Adobe.
Java was created by James Gosling et al. at Sun Microsystems, which has been bought by Oracle.
Java was originally created before the world wide web had 'caught on' (and Java was called Oak).
Java was initially applied to set-top boxes for interactive TV and personal devices (before the mobile phone revolution).
Java has some of the syntax of C/C++, but that is mainly "syntactic sugar" to make it more appealing to C/C++ developers.
Java's underlying model of computation, class/object systems, data types, and run time is quite different from C/C++.

The Maple IDE is written in Java, but if you just use an external editor, you'll never need to program in Java.

Have a look at It http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)

Have you tried any of your operating system's the assistive technology?

Posted 3 years ago #
pico
Member

Assistive technology is a good idea. In Win7, they have:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/Windows7/Make-items-on-the-screen-appear-bigger-Magnifier

Something like that to enable reading the compiler error messages, plus the external editor, and I think you can get past the IDE font problem, and get on with the main game of programming your Maple in C/C++.

Posted 3 years ago #

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