Visual FoxPro Editor Enhancements

Article
10/23/2006

The Visual FoxPro Editor includes many enhancements to make it easier to edit and examine code including additional functionality and redistribution of settings and controls.

The following IDE changes support some of the added functionality of the Visual FoxPro Editor.

Bookmarks and Shortcuts

The Visual FoxPro Editor now displays a selection margin on the left side of the window so you can highlight a line and specify breakpoints, bookmarks or shortcuts. For details, see Creating Bookmarks and Shortcuts.

Bookmarks reference a specific line of source code you might want to return to for further editing or viewing. You can add a shortcut from the selection margin or Editor menu. Bookmarks are not saved between sessions of Visual FoxPro.

Similar to Bookmarks, Shortcuts are persistent code markers that are stored in the Foxtask table and can be accessed using the Task List Manager.

Find Dialog Box

The Find dialog box has new support for performing searches using wildcard pattern matching. Additionally, you can perform searches using several new keyboard shortcuts without opening up the Find dialog box.

Embedded Hyperlinks

Visual FoxPro Editor supports embedding and enabling hyperlinks. When you include any valid hyperlink protocol trigger, Visual FoxPro applies hyperlink attributes to the entered text. For details, see "Embedding Hyperlinks" in Dynamic Information Sharing.

Options Dialog Box

The Options dialog box has the following enhancements:

Editor Tab
The Editor tab of the Options dialog box provides the functionality of the Syntax coloring tab, as well as additional options related to the Visual FoxPro Editor.
IDE Tab
The IDE tab makes it possible for you to specify settings for various types of editors used by Visual FoxPro, including programs, methods, stored procedures, text files and memos. These settings are the defaults used for a new document of a specific type. Once a document is created, its specific settings are stored in the Foxuser resource file, so they can be restored when that document is opened again.

An Override check box provides the ability to globally override a specific document's settings stored in the Foxuser resource file.

If you use Visual FoxPro editors in your distributed applications, you can control their functionality by limiting access to the IntelliSense functions and disabling the availability of hyperlinks.

Miscellaneous Editor Enhancements

In addition to the previously mentioned improvements, this version of Visual FoxPro contains a wealth of other improvements including:

In this version of Visual FoxPro, the editor opens files as DENY WRITE rather than DENY READ, so a file can be read or copied even while it is open in the Visual FoxPro Editor.
You can swiftly selections of text to upper or lower case from the Format or Editor shortcut menus.
The Format menu has new options to toggle word wrap and viewing white space (tab, space and paragraph marks).
A dirty file indicator mark (asterisk) is now displayed next to the file name in the title bar of the editor window if the document contains any unsaved changes.
You can now control whether indentation inserts tabs or spaces. The amount of the indentation can also be set.
The characters used for comment strings when you select Comment from the Format or Editor shortcut menus can be set in the Options dialog box.
While editing source code, the editor now highlights the parameter contents of a function, when you type a close parenthesis character. The duration of the highlighting can be set in the Options dialog box.
A number of new keyboard shortcuts have been added to the editor to improve developer productivity. See Keyboard Shortcuts topic for more details.