The latest Source Editor changes

13 March 2012, 12:40

Hello everyone!

This week we will make the merges for new Aurora, beta and stable releases. This is always great news for us: we get more of the stuff we worked on released to our users.

In the new Firefox stable release (version 11) we have important performance improvements for handling very long lines in the source editor, fixes for CSS syntax highlighting and more. For example, users on Linux can now select text to copy to the primary X11 buffers and they can middle click to paste.

The new Firefox beta release (version 12) adds support for find (Ctrl-F) and jump to line (Ctrl-J), including other smaller fixes.

The new Aurora release (Firefox 13 alpha). This release marks important changes and it includes a number of patches from awesome contributors! The list:

• Bug 684445 - added a default context menu. This is now used in the Style Editor.
• Bug 700893 - added API for tracking the saved/unsaved state of the editor. This code is now used by Scratchpad which had its own tracking for the saved state.
• Bug 707987 - added support for setting breakpoints (for JavaScript debugger we are working on). Stepping support is also coming very soon (Firefox 14).
• Bug 717373 - removed the <textarea> fallback. We now only support the Orion-based source editor (blog post by Rob).
• Updated the Orion integration, included a number of fixes for the read only mode, context menus, selection, undo/redo and more.

Our awesome contributors did:

• Bug 703692 - added support for the focus/blur events.
• Bug 721324 - themes can now change the code syntax highlighting style. 
• Bug 725388 - expose the Orion mousedown/mousemove/mouseup events. This is going to be used by the JS Debugger.
• Bug 725618 - added keyboard shortcuts to move lines up and down.
• Bug 729480 - jump to line can now vertically align the target line: top, center and bottom, and this can include an offset so N lines at the top/bottom are always visible. This feature is now used by the style inspector to link to sheets in the style editor.

Thanks to all the contributors for their awesome work!

Other exciting news: Eric Shepherd, the "documentation overlord", is writing the source editor documentation. For now the wiki page is a work in progress, but the results are already looking great! Eric will also write a guide on how to use the source editor. Thank you Eric!

We hope you like the work we are doing! Comments, suggestions for improvements and patches are always welcome!

Published in: firefox, mozilla, orion, releases, source editor.

Firefox 10

1 February 2012, 13:13

Aloha!

Mozilla has made the final release of Firefox 10. The developer tools team has worked for over 18 months for what you get to play with - this new release brings a lot of the hard work each team member has put into these tools. I am happy to be one of the people who contributed to this really big release. We always strive for quality and performance. While these tools are now undergoing a lot of work in terms of features and polish, they are already at a point where we can be proud of them.

The Eclipse Orion code editor has gone through great improvements since Firefox 8 and it is now enabled by default. Collaboration with the Orion team has been very successful and we are making great progress. I really enjoy working with them!

Firefox 11 beta features a new Style Editor developer tool that also uses the Orion editor for syntax highlighting. We are also working on a JavaScript debugger for a later Firefox release which is going to use the same editor, with additional features.

Keep your Firefox updated and have fun using our developer tools!

Published in: devtools, firefox, mozilla, orion.

Orion in Firefox

12 August 2011, 19:15

Hello world!

Just a quick note: today we have landed the Orion editor in Firefox. If all things go well, users will play with Orion in the new Scratchpad developer tool in Firefox 8.

Implementation and integration notes: only the Orion TextView is used and for now this feature is disabled by default due to some bugs with bidirectional text support and accessibility issues. We are looking into improving the code so we can later enable Orion by default. This will happen after Firefox 8.

To enable Orion you need to go to about:config and change devtools.editor.component to "orion".

An obligatory screen shot and screen cast:

I did the screen cast one month ago. The only changes since then are code quality improvements, bug fixes and minor UI improvements.

Big thanks go to the awesome Orion team for their great project and fruitful collaboration, and to the Mozilla colleagues who had the patience to review all the code I wrote: Robert Campbell, Gavin Sharp and Ehsan Akhgari.

Have fun! Play with tomorrow's Firefox nightly builds or... wait for the Firefox 8 alpha/beta/stable release (whichever you prefer).

If you want gory technical details, just check out the bug reports where all the work was done: bug 636727 and bug 660784.

Published in: devtools, eclipse, firefox, ibm, mozilla, orion, scratchpad.