Flash CS3 has some long-awaited improvements in the integrated ActionScript editor. These are things that really used to drive me nuts and it’s great to see that Adobe has sought to make their tool nicer for developers to use. With increased pressure from external editors like SE|PY and FlashDevelop, I had hoped for more- but this is a good start with some very simple fixes.
You can see in the image above that along the left side of the editor there are now two columns. The right column contains line numbers and the thinner, left column is set aside for breakpoints. Clicking a line number will now highlight that line of code (no more CTRL+CLICK to select lines!) and clicking on the other column will set and remove breakpoints. Ever since they changed the click behavior in MX2004(?) I’ve learned to do a CTRL+CLICK but this is a lot more elegant.
One feature not visible in the image: when the “Auto format” button is pressed to tidy up the code, it will no longer remove empty lines. Thanks, Adobe! I often separate certain code blocks with empty lines and if I were to auto-format previous to CS3, it would result in my code getting all crammed together.
Also of note are some additions to the toolbar. these include code collapse and expansion options, block-level commenting and uncommenting, and the ability to set the “Target” FLA to your class files. All nice additions. I was really hoping to see a nice class viewer in this release but I can live without it (obviously). There are a lot of small improvements like this that I’m finding throughout the application and I’m really very pleased overall.
I’m quite disappointed actually with the AS editor. Code collapsing is not enough really when you’re working with classes.
Have a look at FDT for Eclipse, after you use it for a week you can’t come back :-)
I’m not comparing ActionScript editors here- I’m making the statement that Adobe has made some nice improvements with the internal editor. I agree that when looking at the ‘big picture’, code-collapse is nothing… but again, that wasn’t my point.
I’ve heard FDT is pretty nice but have never used it. What does it have over SE|PY or FlashDevelop???
Preserving empty lines only comes handy when you do want to preserve them.
When I copy-paste some code from FlashKit the code gets to the AS Editor all messed up (with empty lines all over the place), and I have to remove the lines manually, which, for larger chunks of code, is a big waste of time.
I searched but couldn’t find anything on this. Is there a preference to change this behavior?
I don’t see a setting for ignoring empty lines in the autoformat preferences. I agree that it would be nice to toggle between both methods depending on the need. Too bad.