Modern IDE features

While the twinBASIC IDE still has a lot of work planned, it already includes a number of features that make life much easier found in other modern IDE, but not the ancient VBx IDEs, including:

• Fully theme-able, with Dark (default), Light, and Classic (Light) built in, and an easy inheritance-based system to add your own themes via CSS files.

• Code folding, with foldable custom-defined regions via #Region "name" ... #End Region blocks.

• Fully customizable keyboard shortcuts covering all commands, with ability to save and switch between different sets.

• Sticky-scroll, which keeps context lines at the top showing major sections of code like module, region, method, With blocks, etc.

• Indent guides, lines drawn along common indent points to help line things up right.

• Auto-indent on paste.

• Paste as comment.

• Full Unicode support in .twin files, so you can use the full Unicode range of the font in your comments and strings.

• Inline code hints, which provide annotations at the end of blocks for what the block is (see picture).

• Code mini-map, shows a graphics overview of the code structure alongside the scroll bar, helping to guide your scrolling.

• Advanced Information popup, which shows offsets for UDT members, their total size via both Len() plus LenB(), and their alignment; and v-table entry offsets for interfaces and classes, as well as their inheritance chain.

• A type library viewer for controls and TLB files that displays the full contents in twinBASIC-style syntax rather than ODL.

• Color-matching for parentheses and brackets.

• A History panel containing a list of recently modified methods.

• An Outline panel with selectable categories.

• Problems panel, provides a list of all current errors and warnings (you can filter to show only one or the other).

• On the Form Designer, control with Visible = False are faded to visually indicate this. Also, pressing and holding Control shows the tab index of each tab stop.

Full size

• New code structure based Project Explorer:
  

The classic file-based view is still used by default, you can activate the new view with a toggle button:

Package Server

Code can be grouped as a package, and published to an online server. You can have Private packages, visible only to you, or Public packages, visible to everyone.

For more information, see the following Wiki entries:

twinBASIC Packages What is a package

twinBASIC Packages Creating a TWINPACK package

twinBASIC Packages Importing a package from a TWINPACK file

twinBASIC Packages Importing a package from TWINSERV

twinBASIC Packages Updating a package

View Forms and Packages as JSON

Project forms and packages are stored as JSON format data, and you can view this by right-click in Project Explorer and selecting 'View as JSON'. This is particularly interesting for packages as it exposes the entire code in a much more easily parsed format.

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Many more to come!

This list has covered all new features at the present time. There's many more planned, including built-in multithreading syntax, unsigned variable types, native support for aliases (currently supported in type libraries only), full inheritance, and more! If there's a feature you'd like to see, please feel welcome to make a feature request by posting an issue in the main twinBASIC GitHub repository.