CodeSnip Blog

To close off the year, here's a new release of CodeSnip  that adds a couple of new features that have been in the pipeline for quite a while. The first is one I've been working on ever since a user missed out on getting Delphi 11.x Alexandria support when I added it. He expected CodeSnip to just use it when test compiling snippets. It didn't do that. I think his expectation was valid, so I decided to make CodeSnip a bit cleverer! Until now, when support for a new Delphi version was added to CodeSnip you would have to remember to tell it you wanted to use the new compiler, if you had it installed. Now, when CodeSnip starts it checks if there are any versions of Delphi on your system that are not registered with CodeSnip for use when test compiling snippets. If it finds any it offers to register them for you. This feature only works for any version of Delphi that CodeSnip knows about, which for the moment is all of them from Delphi 2 to Delphi 11.x Alexandria. This doesn'

Over 9 years I've had three attempts at creating CodeSnip 5. All have been very ambitious. The latest was CodeSnip Belvedere, rashly announced on new year's day this year. Now I never normally make new year's resolutions, and I should have stuck with that tradition! Of course Belvedere foundered - it was way too ambitious. Again. I was overwhelmed right from the start. Just look at the repo where there have been bugger all commits . So here's a new announcement I can stick by: Belvedere is dead, abandoned, gone. The idea to rebuild CodeSnip from the ground up was an attractive proposition, but it was way too much work. Right from the start I seemed to have an inkling I might have bitten off more than I could chew, because I even queried the wisdom of the new year's resolution in the announcement itself ! And that's what all the failed attempts to create the next release have in common: the plans for the new version were always too ambitious . Maybe I've le

Just released  CodeSnip  4.20.2 which is a bug fix update to CodeSnip 4.20.1. It fixes a bug in the main menu of the UI. To replicate the bug: Drop down a main menu item. Select an item on the dropped down menu using the cursor keys. Do not press enter. Press F1. This raises an exception in CodeSnip prior to v4.20.2 This release also update Windows OS Version detection to correctly detect Version 22H2 of both Windows 10 & 11. Because of the bug fix, I do suggest updating. As usual you can download the program from  GitHub  or from SourceForge: Download Standard Edition   Download Portable Edition Source is available to download from both  SourceForge  or  GitHub . Alternatively you can fork away in the  GitHub repo  - the master branch always contains the source of the latest release, while the develop branch has the latest development source and may not be stable.

Just released CodeSnip 4.20.1 which is a bug fix update to CodeSnip 4.20.0. It fixes a problem in the library that detects operating system version information and makes a few minor documentation changes. There are no changes to functionality. Because of the bug fix, I do suggest updating. As usual you can download the program from  GitHub  or from SourceForge: Download Standard Edition   Download Portable Edition Source is available to download from both  SourceForge  or  GitHub . Alternatively you can fork away in the  GitHub repo  - the master branch always contains the source of the latest release, while the develop branch has the latest development source and may not be stable.

I've managed to work around the problem I had yesterday when my antivirus program prevented me from uploading files to CodeSnip's releases page on GitHub. So, the executable files are now available to download from the Assets section. And how don't need to toddle over to SourceForge to get them! Here's the revised release page . I've updated yesterday's blog post too.

Here's the first CodeSnip update of 2022! First, there's an option to delete your user database if you really want to. Why would you do this? Well there's one possible reason and that's explained in this FAQ . The second main change is that now the size of font in the detail pane can be customised from the Display section of the Preferences dialogue box. This setting applies to all text in the pane with the exception of the source code. The size of the source code can be changed from the Syntax Highlighter section of the same dialogue box. While we're taking about the user database, I also fixed a bug that let you try to backup or move a non-existent user database, which wasn't pretty. There are a few other minor tweaks that you can read about in the  change log . As usual you can download the program from GitHub or from SourceForge: Download Standard Edition   Download Portable Edition Source is available to download from both SourceForge or GitHub . Alternat

As I've blogged about elsewhere  the latest version of Delphi, 11.1 Alexandria has been released. Normally a new Delphi release is followed by a new release of CodeSnip that adds support for test compiling code with the new Delphi. But not this time. Delphi 11.1 is actually an update to Delphi 11.0. You have to update from one to the other - they can't be installed side by side. Also the registry information CodeSnip uses to differentiate Delphi versions has not changed from Delphi 11.0 to 11.1. So there's no way to distinguish between the two. Indeed the RAD Studio's IDE still declares RAD Studio 11 : RAD Studio 11.1 IDE What I am thinking of doing is to alter the way I describe Delphi 11 Alexandria inside to CodeSnip to read Delphi 11.x . Should be straightforward. (Really wish I'd no said that!!)

Well, my cunning plan to make CodeSnip 5 cross platform by using the FMX framework didn't survive contact with reality for long! About as long as it took me to realise that SynEdit is a VCL component, in fact. And I really want to use SynEdit. Another factor was my discovery that Delphi doesn't support GUI applications on Linux out of the box. And, yes, I know there's add on support in Delphi 11 Enterprise for GUI Linux, but that's complicating things slightly. So that further scuppered my cross platform plans. So CodeSnip is to remain Windows only. Ho hum. I'm telling myself it doesn't matter that much because CodeSnip is mainly targeted at managing Delphi code, and the Delphi IDE is Windows only too!

Where have we heard this before? OK, it was way back in 2013 when I first decided to try to develop CodeSnip 5 - a quite radically different version of CodeSnip than version 4. It was code named parsnip , as in pa[r] scal code snip  - really! Along the way that morphed into CodeSnip pagoda  (I can't remember why) and then floundered.  In 2020 there was a partial reboot: pavilion . This was based on parsnip  and was used to investigate one of two possible ways to strip the web service code out of CodeSnip before the services closed in June. It turned out it was quicker to revise CodeSnip 4, so pavilion  got abandoned too. Introducing CodeSnip Belvedere And now, on 1st January 2022, I've just created a new belvedere  branch off the CodeSnip 4.19.0 code tree to have yet another attempt at CodeSnip 5. What makes me think I might succeed this time? Well, I think the main reason the other attempts failed is that I tried to grow v5 from the a code base that goes all the way back to