It was about 2.5 months ago that I planned to release a small bugfix release (keyboard fixes, etc.), but it couldn't come more different than planned... Running out of money, looking for a new day job (my wife got one first!), moving to a new city. But sometimes some distraction is the best thing that can happen to a software project. Being on the road a lot, I spend much reading on my little netbook and I got some critical ideas I was missing on before.

The most critical idea: How to implement modularity and allow extensibility for users. I got a friendly pointer to Zen coding (thanks!) and I started crafting generic scripting interfaces to the dungeons of Pacu. The work so far culminated into libcodetips. And what the hack are "codetips"? Well that term comes from haXe and it serves as the first application of Pacu's shiny new extensions interface. Codetips are basicly dumps of symbol information directly out of the compilation process giving a certain file path and byte position. You have to invoke the haxe compiler as always but give additionally the "--display" option. The details are described here.

The difficulty with codetips was, I couldn't do it like gedit. Gedit is swapping files to provide haXe with the latest editing state, yet retain the old versions for files which are not saved yet. The problem with that: Pacu could have open 100 of files and then crash in the middle (e.g. out-of-memory, power failure) and you could sue me for destroying 50 of your files... (AFAIK there is no warranty disclaimer in German law). Anyway, doing it commercially I probably have to do it right. And therefore I got another critical idea: Library interposition!

The runtime linkers of Linux and OS X differ considerably. OS X for instance encapsulates each library's symbols in its own namespace, while on Linux the symbol reside in a global namespace. I guess the Cocoa guys need this, because Objective-C still not supports namespaces. So the idea was to hijack the system traps of the haxe compiler which go through the system library using library interposition and thereby inject file states, without changing anything on disk. And yes, it should work on both OS X and Linux with the same code base. So being bored between refurbishing my old kitchen I actually tried it and surprise: It's much simpler than someone would expect. The main reason: OS X includes a fully compatible libdl in /usr/lib/libSystem.dylib! (That I figured after trying hundred platform specific ways... Simply take the Linux code, it's working? Ugh... Strange dream I thought.) To make the long story short: The devil lies in the devil, but I couldn't stop once I've started. The entire solution is now part of libcodetips. Check it out, if you like to add haXe support to other products!

New features

• Terminal:
  • dropping of URI into
  • improved highlighting of messages in classic theme
  • configurable tab labels
• Highlighting for:
  • Octave
  • Neko
  • Free Pascal
• Command scripts:
  • nicer editor with highlighting
  • new variable, gives byte position in file: $OFFSET
• Mouse and keyboard:
  • configurable wheel speed (if it has a wheel)
  • enhanced support of advanced touch devices
  • cleanup of keyboard shortscuts

Platform support

Support for Debian Lenny (5.0) and Ubuntu 8.x has beend dropped. Upgrade to Squeeze! The cats should run Pacu 1.2.3 smoothly with any combination of 10.5/10.6 on PPC, x86 or x86_64.

Download Links

Mac OS X: Pacu-1.2.3.dmg

Linux: Pacu-1.2.3.tar.bz2

Changelog Summary

• improved detection of haXe compiler messages
• improved conversion of the Textmate themes included in Pacu
• newly supported language: Cucumber
• new keyboard sugar: allow moving tabs by keyboard shortcuts
• new feature: allow to open files by default application form the context menu of the file browser
• fixed: haXe code browsing was killing Pacu
• fixed: mouse cursor difficult to see on dark background

OS X Specific Changes

• new feature: better integration with launch services
• fixed: make sub-dialogs in the preference dialog show correctly
• fixed: showing keyboard shortcuts correctly in the menus

Textmate Theme Converter

If you have Textmate themes you would like to use, take a look at our theme converter. Simply paste the tmTheme file into the form and save the resulting mytheme.js in /Where/Is/Pacu/shared/charcoal/themes (Linux) or /Applications/Pacu.app/Contents/Resources/charcoal/themes (Mac). Restart Pacu and enjoy!

Future Outlook: Pacu 1.3

The next version of Pacu will focus on productivity features: snippets, auto-completion and code insight. Before that there is a version 1.2.3 planned adding highlighting and code browsing for more languages.

Curious: Pacu is Green

My electrical utility provider informed me, that I saved CO2 emissions equivalent to the CO2 absorption of 52 trees. Thereby I can claim Pacu is build in an environmentally sustained way. Incidentally I know, that it also killed some birds. Beware the magnificent 100m wind turbines. They develop killing speeds at the edges of their rotor blades! So if you like trees, or hate birdies, buy Pacu!-)

Is it only about Flash? No, of course not. And yes, there are alternative implementations of the Flash APIs. For instance look at neash or lightspark.

Ok, here it comes: My first baby steps in Flash coding. The first demo taught me how to use the flash.display.Graphics API and the basics of display lists (n-ary trees actually). Can you get a L-System tree generator in 23 lines of code?

The build options for the haxe compiler (compile.hxml) are as follows:

-swf9 ltree.swf
-main TreeSprite
-swf-header 300:400:10:FFFFFF

class TreeSprite extends flash.display.Sprite {
    static function main() {
        var stage = flash.Lib.current.stage;
        flash.Lib.current.addChild(new TreeSprite(stage.stageWidth, stage.stageHeight));
    }
    public function new(w: Int, h: Int) {
        super();
        graphics.lineStyle(2, 0x008000);
        treeGen(w/2, h, 100, -Math.PI/2, 5, 3);
    }
    private function treeGen(ux: Float, uy: Float, l: Float, phi: Float, n1: Int, n2: Int) {
        var vx = ux + l * Math.cos(phi);
        var vy = uy + l * Math.sin(phi);
        graphics.moveTo(ux, uy);
        graphics.lineTo(vx, vy);
        if (n1 != 1)
            treeGen(vx, vy, 0.8 * l, phi - Math.PI / 45, n1 - 1, n2);
        if (n2 != 1) {
            treeGen(vx, vy, 0.4 * l, phi - Math.PI / 4, 5, n2 - 1);
            treeGen(vx, vy, 0.4 * l, phi + Math.PI / 4, 5, n2 - 1);
        }
    }
}