1. The editor pecularities

Two color schemas: light and dark

Color lines for nesting blocks at the right side

Color or nesting block statements keywords is corresponding to the color of nesting level lines

For block statements CASE / FOR colors for levels are the same always: green, blue, brown (yellow in the dark scheme). When you try to enter the fourth level statement CASE or FOR, it becomes of olive/orange colour, immediately distincting from others and prdicting that something may be wrong. Similarly, the same order of colors for statements PUSH / DEBUG is always used (but there are more then four colors for them still there are no restrictions for its nesting level except the line length restriction).

To provide lines drawn correctly, you should to do indents while typing code (nesting block should have greater indent). The semicolon symbol ';" ending nesting block should be placed either at the end of the last line of the block or in a separate line (and in that case it should be places in the same column as the first letter of the corresponding block keyword).

Indents can be daone using both with spaces or tabs. It is not necessary to provide the same indentation for all the lines in a block though.

The compiler requires for block statements to start from a new line in any case.

Large font for headers of functions, methods, classes, types, block comments

This innovatrion is unique (at least for now) for the IDE AL4. To ensure a header to be shown in a doubled font size it is necessary to provide at least an empty line before the statement, and to restrict its line length at least for 40 characters (otherwise it can not fit the 80 characters line using the large font).

Note, that the large header becomes shown using usual font size if the caret is in the line or some part of the line is selected.

The are no floating tooltips

The most of editors suggesting auto-completion of the code, show variants (tooltips) in irregularly floating windows which obscure the editing text and prevent normal working sometime.

In the IDE AL4 a separate thin window on the right side of the main window is used to show such variants.

To show a function declaration while helping on its parameters a bottom window is using which is sufficient to show two lines of code with usual font size. And to show larger amount of text, font is scaled down automatically. Since amount of parameters should not exceed 3 in moist cases, this size usually is enough.

Quick search in forward (F3) and backward (F2) direction

In most of text editor and IDE environments, it is not possible to switch from searching forward to searching backward without opening Find dailog and clicking with the mouse on it. In the AL4 IDE it is suggested to use key F2.

Search with ignoring spaces

This option allows by not too hard way  to search on a combination of two (or more) words in case when it is not known exactly how many spaces / tabs are between them. It is possible even more right way could be to use regular expressions (but not all the people knows regexp syntax and it is convenient not for all of them).

Search with ignoring comments

This option can be useful e.g. to search not yet commented DEBUG stratements. Very useful in cobinatrion with the above option "ignore spoaces".

Supporting boorkmarks both nonamed (CTRL-B, Ctrl-N) and numbered (Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, ...)

Special operation Ctrl+/ to comment/uncomment block

In the AL-IV there are no convenient for often use block comments (*/ ... /* are not so useful still the code is dual, i.e. ... are containing the source code on the alternative programming language). So the best way is to comment each line of the block using //comments to the end of line. A combination CTRL+/ allows you to automate such operation. It can be useful to comment DEBUG statements (for example).

Special operation Ctrl+' to quote/unquote selected lines of code

The native function mechanism in the AL-IV allows you to place lines of code of a target language into string constants. With the CTRL+' operation this becomes very simple to do so: it is sufficient to select lines and press the key combination. Also the backward operation is possible.

Indentation in code with TAB and SPACE and with SHIFT+TAB/SPACE

To change indentation on one tabulation, you should to select some text and press TAB (or Shift+TAB - to decrease indentation). To indent by one character position right/left use SPACE and Shift+SPACE. For lines of code enclosed into "quotation" or ''double apostrophes'', this indents the code in quotations without (if possible) repositioning such quotation marks.

    2. Building the editor

Building the IDE is not too hard. It is necessary to launch a command file responding for compiling for a certin platform. Just provide before a capability to do this there (see the file "about compilers - read me!.txt" in the folder AL4).

E.g. when the .NET Framework 3.5 is installed in your system then it is sufficient to provide the environment variable AL4 pointing to the AL-IV\AL folder as the value.

To compile for Java, Delphi, C++ it is necessary also to have a certain compiler installed and may be some additional components (see the ...readme).

    3. Downloading

Source code only for IDE AL-IV

Binaries IDE AL-IV (C#.NET)