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The latest Source Editor changes

Article published on: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.