corneliusdavid

The Bookmarks and Navigator Plug-ins for Delphi 13 arrived in GetIt over the weekend.

Well, not with today's disk sizes, I guess. But that's still a LOT of duplicate files. It goes against my "minimalist" mindset, probably stemming back to when HDs were smaller and more expensive. Of course I have revision control. I have libraries under a \lib folder, separate from the project folders; there is a git repo for each. Then each project (or suite of projects) has a git repo as well. There is nothing that is not under revision control. But not everything for a project is lumped together under one project-folder. If I have to set up a new computer, I first get all the libraries and components established, then I load the projects which point to those $(BDSCOMMONDIR) folders like they do on other machines and I'm good to go. Perhaps one reason I shy away from putting libraries under project folders (besides my aversion to duplicating files) is I find dealing with git sub-modules to be a pain. Perhaps I simply haven't tried hard enough to learn how to manage them but I always seem to mess them up. Another reason, I often do a build all and don't like to have library source in the paths because then it recompiles EVERYTHING; once debugged and unit-tested, libraries should never have to be recompiled; if you have a large set of library code, recompiling a project would take a lot longer than it needs to be. I maintain projects in a variety of versions of Delphi. My job only deals with Delphi 5 and 12 but I maintain several old projects for clients that for various reasons are "stuck" in old versions of Delphi. I use Delphi 7, XE, XE2, and 10.4, so keeping library code out in $(BDSCOMMONDIR) is consistent among projects while being in separate folders because each version of Delphi defines that constant uniquely. I can see where keeping library source as local sub-folders to each of those projects would be a benefit but could also become a git-repo-update nightmare as you make a change in one project's library then try to merge it with another project's library source that has a different change.

What if you have dozens (or even hundreds) of projects that use the same set of libraries? Then you have copies of those library source files duplicated many times right? (I'm not being critical, just trying to understand how that would work.) I, too, keep global library paths to a minimum. But what I do (not sure if this is the best approach) is libraries, 3rd-party components, etc. all compile out to $(BDSCOMMONDIR)/Dcp/$(Platform). So the libraries are kept separate but all point to a generic location (I've never had a filename conflict) and my library path includes that "dcp" location, which is also separate but consistent between versions of Delphi.

Well, it was fast until I made that comment--now it's slow again; even timed out a couple of times trying to get back to this thread to respond. GAH!

I noticed it was slow for several days; click "unread" and it would sit there spinning for several seconds. This morning, though, it's fast like normal.

I just checked in GetIt and KSVC 8.0 for Delphi 13 is now available.

If you're wanting to configure SmartInsight, did you see Embaracdero's Documentation?

Huh? Of course it does. There are two IDEs, the 32-bit one has all the normal platform support, including 32-bit compilation; the 64-bit one (still relatively new) only does Win64--for now. There are alternatives as has been mentioned.

Not sure what you mean by "janky" but "deferred" might refer to when you hold an arrow key down through a long source file and the scrolling region is reduced to just a few lines until you stop, then the whole screen is refreshed, right? In that case, I think you might want to look at a new, undocumented feature in Tools > Options > Editor > Scroll Bar: Editor Scroll Mode. Try switching it to "GDI Scroll" and see if that improves things for you.

I just tried with the external formatter and while it kept a breakpoint (one line off because of changes in the code that changed where the line was), all the bookmarks were removed.

There's been a lot of discussion about this. Here's what I offer: https://corneliusconcepts.tech/code-formatting-delphi-13

To clarify why I'm not terribly upset by the removal of refactoring and formatting, 1) refactoring never worked that well so I would always manually search/replace or cut/paste tediously; 2) I'm starting to use MMX Code and like it's capabilities and starting to rely on it and see the great benefits; 3) I still have a quick way to format code using saved profiles from older versions of Delphi; 4) I have hope that there will be a better replacement built into the IDE in the future. If there was no option, no way to refactor or format code and no hope of ever getting it in this IDE, yeah, I would be quite frustrated. But as long as there are alternatives, I'm fine to make do with what's available. It's totally understandable for people to lose patience with Emb for this and other short-comings that have gone on for years; but that's just not where I'm at right now.

Fair points.

I know at least part of this was sarcastic but just in case anyone really believes that, know that some (many?) of us have been plopped into projects written by others with either little coding skill, no sense of style, or hasn’t been warned about the maniac that might have to maintain their code. I’m nearing three years at a job where I’m maintaining and migrating hundreds of old Delphi 5 accounting programs up to Delphi 12. The millions of lines code are strangely formatted, and has been worked on by dozens of individuals who, at one time, called themselves programmers; there are dated comments back to 1997! I use the code formatter every day.

Same here. I think I had to click "more" then "keep".

That's a bit of an exaggerated statement. Code formatting was an optional feature and is most useful if you've inherited old, poorly formatted code or just too lazy to indent properly in the first place (IMHO). Plus, there are other options to continue using it as expressed in the blog. I believe Embarcadero is looking to replace the feature at some point. So, to say this is a huge step back for something so minor is quite petty.

I, too, use the "unread" button to see what's new which covers all forums. But I'm on the fence about whether there needs to be a new one for AI. On one hand, the forums about about Delphi programming topics, VCL vs FMX, algorithms, 3rd-party tools, etc. and AI is completely external to that, like what resolution of monitor you have or brand of keyboard is most productive (ok, probably a big stretch there...). On the other hand, under "Software Development" there are forums for project planning and another for testing, so I can see how using AI would fit in there as another discussion area if people are wanting to categorize their conversations or if someone wanted to see all the conversations pertaining to AI, for example. So, I voted for one new one, assuming it would fit under "Software Development"; for AI topics that deal with the IDE integration (invoking from), those should (IMHO) just be placed under the "Delphi IDE and APIs" category.

@Dave Nottage, thanks for the clarification. It's been the rule of thumb I've used for the little bits of Apple dev I've done but I didn't consider older versions of Delphi or CE.

Always use the most recent version of XCode.

For me, I use AI with Delphi sparingly. But in two cases, it's helped quite a bit: 1) recalling seldom-used functions when I can't remember the right keyword but can describe the problem; and 2) writing unit tests. For web stuff, yes, it's great! The overall consensus, though is that it's not replacing our jobs any time soon: Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

I've got Claude Code installed on WSL2 (Claude helped me get there--it was quite a chore) but probably won't be using it much for Delphi. I support some web sites using the Hugo static generator so plan on getting my feet wet with that.

There are no server settings to set--it's a client-only action and uses whatever MAPI-enabled email client you have installed. If Outlook, then yes, it uses Outlook. On my system, I use eM Client, so a quick sample app pulled up a new email message using that program.

That was my impression, too.

You can create a CGI application as a VCL Program that listens for web requests as if it was running under IIS--makes it very easy to debug (see attached image). Maybe this will help: https://github.com/corneliusdavid/AutoGetIt

This will help get you started on writing components.