Glamorous Toolkit v0.5.1

2019 is here, and so is a new release of Glamorous Toolkit, the moldable development environment based on the freshly released Pharo 7.

Quite a few things are new. The most important highlights are:

• initial support for native windows for Mac and Linux,
• initial XDoc support,
• Debugger reimplementation, and
• text editor deep surgery.

Initial support for native windows for Mac and Linux

For Mac and Linux, you can now open Glamorous Toolkit in native windows.

This is an initial support with a few things still needed to be ironed. To enable it, simply execute:

Bloc preferableHostClass: BlOSWindowHost

Initial XDoc support

XDoc stands for eXecutable Documents, an open container format for content that can be created, exported and opened with Glamorous Toolkit. Currently, the environment supports by default two such documents: one for Playground pages, and one for Documenter documents.

The Playground pages are saved automatically every time you execute a piece of code. These can be retrieved from the Playground menu.

As an application for Documenter documents, we now have blog.feenk.com serving XDoc files. For example, the Glamorous Tour documentation offers a widget that lists the blog entries and allows you to consume them directly in the environment.

A blog component in the Glamorous Tour document showing the entries from blog.feenk.com. Clicking on an entry, downloads and plays the live document.

Debugger reimplementation

The debugger received a whole new implementation. A visible ability is that it merges the stack and the code part of a classic debugger, and the executed methods appear stacked in expandable Method Coders.

On top of the typical debugging actions, the debugger also takes advantage of the moldable code editor and is now able to show values of variables right in place.

And variable values update live as you step through the execution.

The debugger is embedded in the overall inspector workflow. This means that inspecting a variable opens an inspector pane to the right.

A debugging session showing the Debugger embedded in the Inspector workflow.

Text editor deep surgery

The text editor underwent deep surgery to support cursor indexes.

This a major internal change because it allows us to describe text attributes that appear before and after a character. For example, it allows us to show interesting completion previews right in place.

The text editor also received the ability to translate elegantly between logic text indexes and screen positions. This enables us to track the mouse cursor and link that position with the logical text position at all times.

But wait. All these text changes are internal changes. Why mention them in the release notes? Because Glamorous Toolkit is primarily a moldable platform that should provide as much power of expression as possible.

A more detailed list of changes can be found at: https://github.com/feenkcom/gtoolkit/milestone/3?closed=1

Have fun,

The feenk team

p.s. Is there anything that intrigues you? We‘d love to hear from you.