Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Tomboy and MonoDevelop at last!

Thanks to Sandy, Tomboy now has a true MonoDevelop solution!

I'm using the latest MonoDevelop (version 0.13) and am extremely impressed with how well it's working. Now that Tomboy's all hooked-up in there (have to run ./autogen.sh first), I imagine I'll be spending a lot more time using it.

One thing that just blew my socks off is the automatic ChangeLog feature I can see the changes from each file in the individual window, add my comments for each file, and voila, the ChangeLog file is automatically updated when I do a commit. Hands down, this is one of the coolest features I've seen in any IDE for a long time. I was skeptical at first, but I just committed my first code straight from MonoDevelop and never had to even open the ChangeLog file. Way to go guys!

As awesome as this configuration is, I'm still hung up over a few things. I've been a long-time user of Eclipse (yes, even with C#) just purely because I've become addicted to some of its features. Perhaps one day MonoDevelop will have these as well?

  • Split up the screen with different source editors by dragging the source window's tab control to the edge of a the window. There's no limit to the number of separate windows I can split up.
  • Highlight a block of code and press Alt+UpArrow or Alt+DownArrow to move the block of code up or down in the source. This is a really convenient way of swapping the order of source lines. If no blocks are highlighted, it moves the current line.
  • Configurable keybindings
    • I use Ctrl+K (find next selection) and Ctrl+Shift+K (find previous selection) constantly. In MonoDevelop, find next selection is Ctrl+F3, but find previous selection doesn't seem to exist...and I *guess* I can relearn this new keybinding. For those of you coming from Win32, I'm sure no adjustment is needed.
  • I can double-click a source file window tab and it will be maximized in the entire Eclipse application window. This is really handy for when I want to just focus on a single file and need as much real-estate as possible. When I'm finished and want to go back to the normal view, I just double-click the source file's window title/tab again and I'm back where I started.
  • After I save changes to a file, their icon in the left-hand pane appears differently (letting me know it's been modified). Someone mentioned MD does this, but I haven't seen it yet, so maybe it's just a bug.
In any case, despite the missing features, MD seems to have a LOT of sweet little things (like pretty rockin ' code completion). It's definitely got my attention.

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