Home › Forums › General XMetaL Discussion › Really stupid question: Where is the macro editor? › Reply To: Really stupid question: Where is the macro editor?
Derek Read May 5, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Reply to: Really stupid question: Where is the macro editor?
May 5, 2009 at 9:21 pmWe used to include a simple editor with the 3.x and older releases when XMetaL was just called “XMetaL”. Since the version 4.0 release all the developer-centric tools were removed from “XMetaL” and the product was broken into two pieces: “XMetaL Author”, the XML editor itself, and “XMetaL Developer”, which is used to customize XMetaL Author and XMAX. XMetaL Developer includes the Macro editor, CTM editor, CSS editor, XFT editor, the Programmers Guide, Customization Guide and some other things).
XMetaL Developer is a plug-in for Visual Studio, so Visual Studio is required.
There are many 3rd party script editors that might give you some of what you are looking for, if you write your scripts in a language they are configured to understand (JScript, VBScript, PerlScript, or Python for example).
What these 3rd party tools will not give you that XMetaL Developer does is the ability to properly debug XMetaL Author and the scripts it is loading. This is the main advantage that I enjoy when building MCR files. You also get “edit and continue”, the ability to “step through”, “step over”, and “step out” as scripts are running, as well as the ability to visually check on variable values, including the full DOM node tree at any given time, object children, an easy way to set break points and bookmarks and the standard features that are built into a particular Visual Studio version (some support Intellisense, etc).
