Hi Everyone,

I am trying to make a code editor in basic I was wondering what is a good way to colour chars in a text editor. I have a way to change the colours in a text editor but I find it is very slow checking the document when I am writing in side. The main problem is with things like " or '

I want it to colour anything blue inside those chars. But they can spread accross several lines.

Please does anyone has any suggestions?

Thanks,

Cameron.

First, there are a billion editors, so just look at them. Second, this is a personal taste thing that's why all editors allow you to change the colors of the foreground, background text, comments, keywords, etc. Thus, you need to do this, have a little dialog that let's you set all the colors as a set, then have a handful of default settings like; windows standard, retro, Atari, high contrast, etc.

Andre'

Hi Andre,

Thank you for your reply. I am not really talking about how to setup colours in a text editor. I am talking about how to make an editor. I find that my loops take too long to complete. How did you guys go about making your stuff?

Cheers,

Cameron

Which loops specifically Cameron? You're coding this with BASIC too you said, which dialect of BASIC?

That'll help us help you a little better.

Hi Thanks for your reply,

I am making it in RealBASIC and the loops are to scan thurth the current lines to find if I should apply colour or not. So for example if someone types the char " I can the line until i see another " and stop the colour from their. This seems to cause a lot of work for the computer :S

Any help please

I see what you're saying, well sounds like your optimization skills needs work This is what happens when you run i5, i7s at 3 GHz, you get sloppy Anyway, you need to look at your representation of your data and use a more efficient method to search the text, also, you need to compute where highlighting is going ONCE on the fly, then update the data structure, for example.

The sentence:

This is a sentence "now everything in the quotes" should be blue!

But, if I change the sentence to :

This is a new sentence "now everything in the quotes" should be blue!

I only change a part of the sentence that has nothing to do with the quoted text, thus since I have ADDED any quotes, there is NO need to scan for quotes, all I need to do is update the position of the texthighlighting and NOT search the text, thus I need a linked list of pointers to the sections that are quoted, etc.

So, the point is to create dynamic data structures that give information and hints to what you need to do, so you don't have to scan every single keystroke and make updates --

Andre'

Thanks Andre,

I will take your suggestions