Fifesoft Blog

The next release of RSyntaxTextArea and RSTAUI will feature some enhancements to the Search API.

Find and Replace operations were always done through the SearchEngine class.  This class contained the following static methods:


   public static boolean find(JTextArea textArea, SearchContext context)
   public static boolean replace(RTextArea textArea, SearchContext context)
   public static int replaceAll(RTextArea textArea, SearchContext context)


The find() and replace() methods returned whether a match was found/replaced, and the replaceAll() method returned the number of replacements performed.

In order to do a “mark all”, you had to call a method on an RTextArea instance:


   public int markAll(String toMark, boolean matchCase, boolean wholeWord, boolean regex)
   public void clearMarkAllHighlights()


In the next release of RSTA, the “mark all” API will be moved into SearchEngine, so that it is a one-stop shop for everything related to search. Further, these methods will return a new SearchResult object, containing more uniform, detailed information on the result of the operation.

The find() and replace() methods will now check context.getMarkAll(), and if it returns true, they will automatically perform a “mark all” operation along with the find/replace requested. This is very useful because often, people want to visually see what other matches are nearby the one actually found and selected.

The search-related components in RSTAUI have been updated as well. Besides the existing Find and Replace dialogs, there are now two new components – FindToolBar and ReplaceToolBar. When wrapped in a CollapsibleSectionPanel, these tool bars can provide a search UI integrated into an application’s main window, as opposed to the standard approach of modal dialogs. This is the trendy new way of doing things. In addition, these components use an animation to “slide” in and out of the UI, breathing a little bit of life into a Swing application.

Below is an example of setting up a window where Ctrl+F and Ctrl+H will bring up a FindToolBar and ReplaceToolBar, respectively:

   JPanel contentPane = new JPanel(new BorderLayout());
   frame.setContentPane(contentPane);

   JMenuBar mb = new JMenuBar();
   frame.setJMenuBar(mb);
   JMenu menu = new JMenu("Search");
   mb.add(menu);

   // Create our search tool bars and tie their search contexts together.
   findToolBar = new FindToolBar(this);
   replaceToolBar = new ReplaceToolBar(this);
   replaceToolBar.setSearchContext(findToolBar.getSearchContext());

   // Add our search tool bars to the "collapsible section panel."
   // Ctrl+F and Ctrl+H will display these tool bars. Use the returned actions to
   // create menu items for our application menu bar.
   CollapsibleSectionPanel csp = new CollapsibleSectionPanel();
   contentPane.add(csp);
   int ctrl = getToolkit().getMenuShortcutKeyMask();
   KeyStroke ks = KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(KeyEvent.VK_F, ctrl);
   Action a = csp.addBottomComponent(ks, findToolBar);
   a.putValue(Action.NAME, "Find...");
   menu.add(new JMenuItem(a));
   ks = KeyStroke.getKeyStroke(KeyEvent.VK_H, ctrl);
   a = csp.addBottomComponent(ks, replaceToolBar);
   a.putValue(Action.NAME, "Replace...");
   menu.add(new JMenuItem(a));

Here’s an example of what the tool bars look like:

Find Tool Bar

Replace Tool Bar

Ctrl+F/Ctrl+H toggles between them, and Escape hides the currently visible one, if any.  If “Mark All” is enabled, all matches are selected in the editor as you type, which is a very nice feature.  The “mark all” event waits for a short time after you stop typing before it fires (defaulting to 200 ms).  That way, it doesn’t perform a mark-all operation for each letter you type if you type really quickly.

Just like the older Find and Replace dialogs, the Find and Replace tool bars will offer code completion for regular expressions:

Regex assistance

This code is already pushed to GitHub; all I have left to do is some more testing.  I also plan on improving the performance of “mark all;” it’s slower than the “mark occurrences” support in RSTA and there’s no reason for that.  And since these new components make it so easy and handy to have “mark all” enabled all the time, I figured I’d go ahead and knock that out sooner rather than later.

The upcoming release of RSyntaxTextArea will support syntax highlighting and code folding for .htaccess files.  This was just added in SVN commit 814.

htaccess Support

Does anybody really need Java 1.4 support anymore?  RSTA is one of the few remaining, active Swing libraries that supports this ancient version of Java.  It reached its EOL in 2008 (almost 5 years ago!), and even its extended support ended in February 2013.  Being a syntax highlighting text component, there hasn’t really been anything added to the JDK from Java 5 onward that would benefit it, so I’ve been keeping its minimum JRE version back at 1.4, just to keep it as “compatible” as possible.  However, there are a few drawbacks because of this:

1. There is one API change in the JDK that occurred between Java 1.4.2 and 1.5 that affects RSTA.  The code in the repository builds cleanly when built with a true 1.4 JDK, but you will receive an error for XmlParser.java when building with Java 5+ (even if you set -source 1.4).  When building RSTA with the included Ant build scripts, you will get a big fat explanation of this spit to stdout, so you know rectify the situation if it happens to you (just add a throws-clause to a single method), but Java novices may not fully understand what’s not working.  Moving the bar up to 1.5 will clean this issue up entirely.
2. For JavaScript code completion, RSTALanguageSupport has a dependency on Mozilla Rhino, which is developed with Java 5 but offers a 1.4-supporting version, I believe using Retroweaver.  While this is fine and dandy, and everything works, a future version of Rhino may well not include a pre-built 1.4-compliant Rhino jar, and I certainly don’t want to be in the business of building and supporting it myself.  It would be a little nicer if this nuance weren’t there.
3. One area where the JDK does offer nice new functionality for an editor like RSTA is XML parsing.  We could add schema-based squiggle underline validation to XML files.
4. It would be a little nice to modernize the code base.

If anyone feels strongly that we should keep releasing pre-built versions of RSTA that run on Java 1.4, please let me know, preferably in the forums.

Have you ever been interested in integrating syntax highlighting for your own, custom language into RSyntaxTextArea?  Now there’s finally a guide to help you do just that!

http://fifesoft.com/rsyntaxtextarea/doc/

This “developers documentation” section describes in detail how syntax highlighting is implemented in RSTA, and multiple ways that you can add your own.  In the future, it’ll have similar documentation on adding code folding, code folding, and squiggle-underline parsing.

Feedback is welcome!