New approach to OMEdit text editing

[Francesco Casella]

I report here the results of a discussion on omusability@….

Keeping the formatting consistent on models and packages spread over multiple files while hiding the file structure is an implementation nightmare, and also obscure and confusing to people using file-based revision control systems (SVN, GIT, etc.).

Proposal: whenever a specific class is selected in the package browser, the entire file where the class is defined is shown in the text mode editor, with this additional features:

• the part of the file where the code of the selected class resides is clearly marked (e.g, with a white background, while the rest of the file might have a grey background or something similar)
• the cursor is brought at the first line of the selected class automatically
• there is proper indentation support when hitting the newline key: if the model is nested several levels in a subpackage contained in one file, and the package is organized with proper indentations, one should not have to enter 12 or 16 spaces manually to keep the indentation consistent. Note that Dymola hides the indentation of a class definition in a package when showing it in the editor, and then somehow reapplies it back to the code, which is somewhat arbitrary and potentially error- prone, see above)
• the line numbering of errors and warnings given by omc matches the line numbering in the editor

At this point, whatever changes one makes to the entire file (possibly not limited to the selected class!) are accepted by OMEdit (as long as they are syntactically correct) when the focus is changed to another window, and the package browser will automatically reflect the new situation.

This should be relatively straightforward to implement, much easier to understand for end-user, and a lot better for managing files on RCSs without messing up things.