Twinspire, a free and open source editor for Haxe devs!

[Luke Selman]

Twinspire is a work-in-progress editor for Haxe, an ambitious project that I wish to continue. Some features may be paid, but the first few editions will be free and open source. These features include:

• Syntax highlighting for the following languages: Haxe, C/C++, JavaScript, HTML, C#, Lua, PHP, SQL, Visual Basic and XML.
• Integrated Command Line (Input redirection is currently unavailable).
• Error Handling for Haxe and compiled projects.
• Shortcut keys for the editor: Go to, Find/Replace, Saving and Loading, Box Selection, Macros and more.
• Build Configurations.

More features are to come, including a 2D/3D visual editor for web, level and scene design, data editor, debugging, profiling, auto-completion, and perhaps even live previewing/instantaneous feedback.

Currently, this editor is only available on Windows using the .NET Framework 4.5 or later. Once all the core features have been released, work will start on making it compatible with Mono. If HaxeUI/Quaxe comes along and features the GUI required to make a port work, perhaps the editor will be rewritten in Haxe.

You can download, view docs and see the source here.

Happy coding! Feedback is highly appreciated!

[Mark Knol]

I'd like to try it but I cannot install it: https://github.com/twinspire/twinspire/issues/1

[Cambiata]

Same problem for me.

[Luke Selman]

Oh, sorry about that. I've updated the release section now.

[Philippe Elsass]

I'm afraid to sound a bit negative but: you really don't have anything better to do with your time?

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[Luke Selman]

Thank you for your feedback.

While I do not wish to mention my personal circumstances in public forums, on this occasion, unemployment is the reason for this project. It is a passion of mine to develop software, and while I have no qualification or commercial experience to back up the fact that I can develop, the only way I can prove to employers that I can develop software is to continue developing my portfolio, either with open source projects, or projects that I actively sell.

I thank you once again for your feedback. Please let me know if you have any further questions or queries regarding this project.

[Cambiata]

You might have some interesting workflow ideas, Luke. (command-line stuff etc.)
Couldn't those be implemented as macros or plugins in the existing IDEs?

Writing an IDE is such a huge task (in so many aspects), and the Haxe community has seen some brave one-person IDE initiatives in the last years - today they are all stalled.
You can do this for fun, or for whatever reason - but with that background, you sholuldn't expect any applaus from the community in the first round.

From my perspective, a switch to Mono, and continued develop using Haxe and the C# target, would make your project interesting for me.
Not because I need another IDE (I really dont!), but as a project in field where Haxe have a lot of potential, but where there are very few examples.

Best! / Jonas

[Philippe Elsass]

That was a bit mean from me, but Jonas described the IDE situation well.

In a more constructive way, believe me, IDEs become really hard and boring very quickly.

If you want to have fun and people actually using your project, take an existing editor/IDE and build on top of it.

If you want C# and challenge, build on top of MonoDevelop (there's a basic Haxe plugin) or contribute to IntelliJ.

Those are the things that will make you a hero and be just as good on your CV.

Cheers.

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Philippe

[Franco Ponticelli]

Or port the plugin for Atom from JS to Haxe, I bet you will get more contributions if it is written in Haxe (I know it is already in the plans but I didn't see much updates lately).

[Luke Selman]

One IDE that comes to mind that is not free and uses Haxe is Stencyl (which is a massive success), and if Jonathan Chung can do it, I can't see why anyone else can't. My idea stemmed from Stencyl, but catered for programmers moreso than designers. Eventually, my editor would include a 2D world editor at the very least, with support for OpenFL, Flambe and HaxeFlixel.

Yes, it would take a long time to create. Of course, Stencyl is cross-platform because it's written in Java, meaning that it might be more difficult to compete with. Still, despite that I know some people are not looking for another IDE, there are others in this community that does want a fully functional IDE, with debugging tools that actually work (breakpoints, diagnostics, performance, the lot), profiling, and perhaps more. Because I myself have not found one to my liking (despite that I am okay with FlashDevelop at times), I am willing to take the steps necessary to perhaps be a hero.

When people told Steve Jobs that he was out of his mind when he wanted to revolutionize computing, did he give up? No, and he succeeded, and Apple is one of the most successful IT companies in the world.

I won't give up. Twinspire will continue development, it will continue improving, and I will surprise you ;)

 

Luke Belsten

Lead Developer

Colour Multimedia Enterprises

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[Philippe Elsass]

Every single feature you list (2D editor, debugger, profiler) is months of work alone to bring further than the proof-of-concept level.

Our point is that you could build it on top of some other editor - something like (but not limited to) Atom, IntelliJ, MonoDevelop, etc., saving you to build a lot of infrastructure and boring stuff like properly working "Find in files".

Anyway, good luck.

[Raoul Duke]

Sheesh. Both sides have valid points, no? e.g. Just because some other
IDE already implemented Find doesn't mean (a) they did it the right
way for everybody, (b) the rest of the IDE's code isn't hell.

[Will Maynard]

My two cents: speaking from experience in my job hunting, employers prefer projects which contribute to existing products than watch someone try to reinvent the wheel.  Demonstrating that you can work with other people's code / APIs / be a valued team member is often more impressive to a hiring manager than doing everything yourself, because when you do get hired, you likely won't be working solo.

I think it's great that you have this passion and drive, and I'm not telling you to stop by any means, but I would worry that Twinspire would suffer at a point, especially if its primary purpose is to land a spot on your profile for a job hunt.  Once you're gainfully employed, development will likely slow or cease.

Good luck, and I'll follow any future Twinspire news that comes my way.

[Atul Kumar]

I personally also would love if somebody would work on a decent debugger for mac for example. Otherwise I am quite happy with Sublime. But debugger support somewhere on mac would be great. I had high hopes for Intellij, but till now it never seem to work.

When I read about your "Twinspire" idea I also thought: "A new IDE? Windows only? And from scratch? Never gonna happen". FlashDevelop is prettiy great I heard, btw ;) But who knows?

I have the feeling Haxe seems to be an eco space which attracts people who want to do things they own way and to reinvent the wheel. Maybe it is a good thing? My wish also would be for more collaboration though. Fixing the Intellij plugin for example.. or maybe a port of FlashDevelop to mono. FlashDevelop is open source, isn't? 

Anyways..I also which u best of luck and success (and me and others to be surprised), but I will not hold my breath. As soon as there is a version for mac which is comparable to current sublime text plugin feature wise I will happily test / use it though (don't forget the debugger ;)

[Justin L Mills]

Atul

If haxe had swift/obj-c target then Haxe devs could add to textmate2 which is opensource, but I am not sure it would be possible to add to it with haxe c++ easily, has anyone tried, certainly just setting up the project last time I looked was not so simple but I was on old mac at time.  I suspect mono would always be a compromise on mac.

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[Jérémy Faivre]

@Franco Ponticelli Actively working on the haxe rewrite/refactoring for Atom actually ("actively" includes yesterday). I know it may look a bit "dead" from outside though, but plans didn't change! We just prefer to take time to make it right.

[Itzik Arzoni]

This is my humble opinion:

If making an IDE is in your mind, than contributing to FlashDevelop in my opinion is a better investment. For now it is a very good Haxe and Flash Projects IDE, with a project manager and lots of small plugins that makes a big product.

It's extensiblity is good with a plugin system and a macro / scripting.

You can either extend the functionality by adding plugins (for UI or 2D, or HaxeFlixel/OpenFL project managment) or helping by solving some of the open issues, to make the main developers more available to add more features (Like the long awaited Solution projects ;) ).

But if just making a program for your own learning and advancing is in your mind, and a haxe IDE is your choice - than by all means, it's for the best. :)

[Luke Selman]

"But if just making a program for your own learning and advancing is in your mind, and a haxe IDE is your choice - than by all means, it's for the best. :)"

Yeah, if I may be honest while C# is my most proficient language, I don't have enough commercial experience to know everything the language has to offer. In fact, it was only recently when I learned about the "lock" keyword and the fact that it even existed.

I'm still learning a huge amount in the language, and I feel I may be better off developing Twinspire for the purposes of learning, and perhaps to use it for my own Haxe projects (even if no one else uses it). Just like Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero project, Twinspire is a passion project, perhaps free and open source. Up to you if you wish to use it.

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[Jeff Ward]

@Jérémy Faivre - I like this approach, as Atom is cross-platform and JS (Haxe-friendly). I know very little about Atom -- does it support scripting? I'm curious whether it would be possible to get the hxcpp debug events working. Aka, breakpoints, step in, etc. Does Atom have the capability to goto lines, create window with buttons, etc?

Best,

-Jeff

[Franco Ponticelli]

That is awesome! I use it daily and I'd really like for it to be a little more complete. Thanks for your work.

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[Franco Ponticelli]

Atom is entirely coded in JS so there are plenty of opportunities to write plugins and such.

[Philippe Elsass]

FlashDevelop and MonoDevelop are open source C# projects, Atom and Brackets are in JS, Sublime Text and IntelliJ have open source Haxe plugins. All these projects are designed with extensibility in mind and have a significant community of users.

Nowadays only large companies go build editors/IDEs because it requires enormous engineering resources. Projects without company support, like FlashDevelop or Sublime Text are the result of many years of work (both are about 10 years old now) and yet they manage to still suck for different reasons.

And all of these editors depend greatly on having lots of external contributors.

Finally, the only ones making any money directly from the product itself are mammoths like Microsoft or JetBrains. The guy behind Sublime Text has had a combination of talent, luck and lack of competition - this is changing now as competition is ramping up.

As it was said before, if getting hired matters, your capacity to contribute to a project will be a highly valued quality.

Cheers

[Jérémy Faivre]

@Jeff Ward It is definitely possible to create an hxcpp debugger with Atom, even though that would mean implement the ui code to add/remove breakpoint etc... That said this is not the priority at the moment. (I would love to have that though). It is also definitely possible to add panels with buttons etc...

@Franco Ponticelli Cool, I also would like to make it more complete. The current (javascript-based) implementation is frozen because we are focusing on making a clean haxe code base designed to be cross platform from the beginning and that can be maintained reliably in the long run. Rewriting it with Haxe also mean we will be able to share a big portion of the code with other IDEs (Sublime Text). It needs some time to be done right, but everything is done toward this direction.

The lack of truly complete (and not windows-only) editor for Haxe was one of the reasons I took so long to be active in the Haxe community, and I am sure I am not the only one experiencing this. That said I don't believe in writing a whole IDE for Haxe from scratch. Tools like Sublime, Atom, IntelliJ (even if I stopped enjoying IntelliJ for a while) are the result of a huge work and a lot of thoughts. Let's take advantage of this! Plus they are designed to be extensible and already have plenty of plugins that can be useful for Haxe development as well. I ended up working on this Atom plugin (with snowkit community) because I personally think tooling/code editor for Haxe is one of the most important aspects of Haxe to make it a successful language. Now that I will use a lot more Haxe code in the coming years (and in a full-time daily basis), achieving this goal becomes even more important to me. But again — and stopping being off topic — I don't think it would reasonable to start from scratch, unless doing it "for fun/learning".

Le lundi 16 novembre 2015 01:05:38 UTC+1, Luke Selman a écrit :

[Benjamin Dubois]

Of course, Stencyl is cross-platform because it's written in Java, meaning that it might be more difficult to compete with.

​No, because it's written in Haxe. :)
http://www.stencyl.com/features/faq/
​

 

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[Luke Selman]

As it says on the website "Stencyl's engine is written in Haxe and based on OpenFL, an open source project that mirrors the full Flash API". I was talking about the editor, mainly. Not the engine itself, I am aware they would be a competitor because they're ENGINE is written in Haxe, but the editor is more so the reason why because it's written in Java, and it's easier to write cross-platform code with Java than it is with C#.

[Franco Ponticelli]

Visual Studio Code has now a plugin system: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vscode/archive/2015/11/17/announcing-visual-studio-code-beta.aspx

It is now a very good candidate for a cross-platform IDE for Haxe.

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[Jeff Ward]

Ooh, good stuff, Franco!

Here's the "language server" doc that is presumably what we need for creating a Haxe language plugin: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/example-language-server

Here's the information on creating a debug adapter (debugging extension): https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/example-debuggers

I'm intrigued, and may have to do something about this debug API attached to a free cross-platform editor -- the exact thing I've been looking for -- just dangling in front of me! :D

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[Franco Ponticelli]

Go for it and keep us posted ;)

[Philippe Elsass]

The documentation is pretty amazing!

[clemos]

Best thread hijacking ever btw :\

[Luke Selman]

| Best thread hijacking ever btw :\

I stopped talking because of that very reason. ;p

[Jeff Ward]

I disagree, all messages to date have been relevant to 90% of the thread title:

Twinspire, a free and open source editor for Haxe devs

:D

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

Really? Are you sure he's not referring only to the game engine itself? 

If so all the GUI elements are custom-made? I was under the impression it was a SWING or some other Java GUI toolkit. If the editor/client is really OpenFL then what an impressive work, and it'd be really great if the Stencyl author could release the GUI toolkit he used for it! A blog post about it would be helpful as well :)

[Hudson Ansley]

Jeff Ward, that would be so great to have haxe supported in visual studio code. I'm currently researching haxe as a possible migration solution for our AIR mobil project, and not having decent debugging on Mac is likely a deal breaker for the team.

What is the best way to follow potential updates from you about this project? (too soon? :-)

Cheers,

Huson

[Justin Espedal]

To quickly reply to comments about Stencyl, yes the IDE is written in Java with Swing. Haxe is only used for the game engine, which is built on top of OpenFL.

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

Ah, that's what I thought. Thanks Justin.

Btw, do you use Haxe Java or plain Java for the IDE?

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[Justin Espedal]

Plain Java. It had already been in development for a number of years (since early 2008) before we discovered Haxe and rewrote the game engine in it. I'm not sure how feasible it would be to port the IDE to Haxe, but it's interesting to consider the possibilities. :)