[antlr-interest] ANTLRWorks 2 (for ANTLR v4)

[Terence Parr]

On Sep 7, 2011, at 11:56 AM, James Reid wrote:

> I for one would like to see it based off of the Netbeans Platform.  I have my own editor for an inhouse language that is built on top of Netbeans and I use ANTLR for my lexing/parsing and the parsing loop works great. 

I looked at that, but it seemed very complicated, or at least with a very large learning curve. Given that the eclipse platform is probably more popular it seemed I should invest in that instead if I were going to look at a platform. in the end, I decided it would be simpler to do this in an isolated fashion with swing.

> 
> With that aside, my biggest complaint would be the editor responsiveness that Andreas was talking about.  I also agree about the way Netbeans does it (half second after user stops typing).  

 agreed. that is my 1st priority.

> 
> Another thing I would like to see is a menu/toolbar action to automatically generate debug versions of the current grammar.  I rarely launch the AW debugger directly.  I mainly have to use the remote debugger because of the way my project is setup in Netbeans.

 I've been wondering about the build options... I'm not sure we want AW to really be part of the build process. I use intellij and/or ant for that.

>  So I have to open the preferences (which sometimes takes several several seconds) type in -debug generate the language, move the files to my project to test it out.  Then, when I believe it's working, or I see what I was doing wrong, I have to open the preferences again (which sometimes takes a while) remove the -debug and regenerate.  This process gets to be tedious and annoying after doing it several times in a row.

 okay, I got it. added something to

http://www.antlr.org/wiki/display/~admin/2011/09/02/ANTLRWorks+2+planning%2C+features

> 
> Another complaint would be the general GUI Look and Feel.  Maybe I'm spoiled, but after working in the Netbeans environment and then moving to AW to work on my grammar stuff feels like a "downgrade".  Don't get me wrong, AW is great and it's helped me out enormously.  I don't like the way the docking/undocking of the AST panel during debugging works.  Actually, I'm not a fan of the docking situation in general.  So, yeah the flow of the GUI in general needs an overhaul in my opinion.

 I don't think I will be doing docking for this... I am not a GUI expert and would love it if somebody could draw out even with a pencil a few different view layouts that we need.

> 
> Man, I wish I had more free time or I would start working on an AW integration into Netbeans and/or a standalone Netbeans RCP of AW.

 with luck, these components will be widgets that you could incorporate easily.

Ter