So many editors...

Hey I'm just looking at the various offline editors I can use in the wiki. Lots of good info, but I really don't want to try them all, I just want to know which one or two have all the best features.

All I'm trying to do is find a nifty one with lots of good features that I can run from my flash drive and don't have to pay for. (I'm not paying $ for a text editor, dun care how fancy it is... besides I'm broke. heh) But actually trying all of them seems time consuming.

You'll probably get a different answer out of each person that posts here, but I use Scite-ez with the lslint "compiler" and they work perfectly for what I need.

Seconded. What Stylez says is absolutely correct: If there were only one or two 'best' editors, they would have been flagged as such on the Wiki. We can't possibly know what your criteria for "best" is, and not all editors listed even run on every operating system.

I also use Scite-ez with lslint, and have found it to be incredibly useful and powerful. Scite-ez annoys the crap out of me on occasion, but it is a good editor, and lslint is absolute gold. Especially during grid downtime

Make that thirded. I also use that combination, to the point that I pretty much couldn't do without it these days.

I'm also a fan of Scite-Ez and lslint as a combination, especially when using Scite-Ez's preprocessor capability. Macro's!!!

Notepad++ is also pretty good, but lacks the integration of lslint.

Besides the "which editor is the best" discussion, I personally think the biggest question is, how to update all the scripts in SL. Currently I do this via Cut&Paste, which is quite time consuming when you have to update multiple prims/scripts.

Is there a better solution to this? Can one of the editors automate this process?

Sorry for raising another question rather than givin an answer.

Well yeah, I figured I was opening a can of worms, but I mainly wanted some advice on a reallly good place to start. I tried LSLEditor, mainly because it was small and looked like it could compile the code into C# which would help me debug it.

Unfortunately it lacks basic text editing features such as search/replace and the script I'm working on while working find in SL first broke the compile since it named a function name() which I renamed so it would compile, but still the runtime thingy errors and I haven't figured that out.

I don't want to have to debug code that actually works fine in SL. heh Anyways it looks like I got what I wanted. Thanks everybody.


As for updating scripts. I think copy/paste is still the only way of getting scripts into SL, unless they've implemented an upload feature like they have for textures. (Which if they have not they soooo should. Preferably with bulk upload capapbility rather than just 1 at a time.)

In my research some of what I read seemed to indicate the possibility of LL even letting us compile the binary clientside and upload the whole thing. But I'm not really in the know... I'm still an LSL noob.

Well, with opensourcing SL, i hope somebody (maybe me ), will find the time to finally add an API allowing to upload/download/compile scripts directly from the scripting window to an external editor. (It will probably still be necessary to 'open' the scripts in the specific object itself).

It will be hard to make this platform independent though. (As Windows uses COM or .NET, Mac uses IAC Apple Events/Applescript and Linux uses, ehm...one of the other 3 million IAC protocols...)

Here's a question... can I upgrade Scite-Ez to the newer version of Scite easily and keep all the LSL goodies? I dunno if anybody's tried, but I did note that Scite-Ez is currently unsupported.

Also when trying to use ESL files for #define ect functionality it's wigging out on the compile command.

command.compile.*.esl=cmd /c cl /nologo /X /u $(esl.strip.comment) /Tc"$(FileNameExt)" /EP >"$(FileName).wsl" && "$(SciteDefaultHome)\stripper.exe" "$(FileName).wsl" "$(FileName).lsl" && del "$(FileName).wsl"


the little "cl" thing near the beginning is the culpret. I'm not sure if I should omit it or change it to "/cl" or what. I'll play with it, but thought I'd ask in case I created some crazy unintentional result.

Ahhh I think I understand now... the way the site reads it seems like the preprocessor is included and all you have to do is name your files ESL and hit F5. But apparently I have to supply my own preprocessor.

I don't have Visual studio, so does anybody have a suggestion on a free C preprocessor I can use? (I'm looking but haven't found one yet.)

is there an external editor that you can use to test your code on? (i guess this will require 3d interfacing of some sort, as i'm not talking aboout just verifying code for syntax errors, and stuff)

Yes, SciTE-ez with lslint.... two programs combined to edit (SciTE) and test for errors (lslint). You could also copy/paste your code to this website to run lslint if you choose an editor other than SciTE.

http://w-hat.com/lslint/

see this thread for a few.

No as yet although the LSLEditor being developed will generate dialog style buttons for testing events. Its still in its infancy but has shows promise

the only way to have a real offline build and test enviroment would be to have a sim emulator, with things like the dataserver functionality faked.