In my last post I wrote about how to use maven with Yeti. Today I want to write about the – still basic – editor support for yeti.
Yeti has editor-support for vim, notedpad++ (windows) and Netbeans. It is very limited – basically syntax higlighting and brace matching etc.
Still try it out.
All of them take you a minute to install. None of them is buggy (because they are simple). And eyes just like colors.
I’ll shortly describe each of them below. If you are in a hurry skip the next paragraph.
A few Words on IDE Support in General
I think if you chose/try a a new language you should really see how it does with a simple plain editor, because in programming the language is the cook and the IDE is the waiter when you are the restaurant owner.
The best IDE with code-completition, -analysis, refactoring, generation what so ever can only go so far as the language lets it and has to go so far because the language needs it.
And for that reason none of the most popular languages today started out with excellent IDE support. In contrary most of the time the falling languages have had the best IDE support because IDEs have to make good what the languages do not support but newer competing languages do.
This does of course not mean that IDE support is useless – of course it would also be very nice if Yeti had Java-quality IDE support. However it is no way as important for Yeti as ie for Java for different reasons:
- Yeti code is compact so you do not type that much especially foreign defined identifiers like classnames for typing where ie code-completetion helps a lot
- For the same reason you do not have to read that much and an outline-few is not such a must.
- There are also not huge apis with hundreds of classes each having in turn tenth of (partly inherited) methods so again code-completetion documentation-popup etc is not that important.
- The yeti-compiler is very fast and with the continues compilation possibility shown in the last post you do have very short edit/run/test cycles, which makes error-higlightning less important
Enough said here are the supported Editors/IDEs.
Vim
Vim support comes form the creator of Yeti Madis himself. You find the syntax and filetype plugin at the home page of yeti http://mth.github.com/yeti/.
To install the plugin follow this quotation from the Yeti homepage:
Vim syntax hilighting and filetype plugin.
Save these files as ~/.vim/syntax/yeti.vim and ~/.vim/ftplugin/yeti.vim accordingly, and add
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.yeti setlocal filetype=yeti ts=8 sw=4 sts=4 expandtab
into your ~/.vimrc.
Notepad++
Notepad++ is one of the most popular Editors for Windows.
You can download a “user defined language” file for Yeti : http://chrisichris.github.com/chrisis-maven-repo/notepadplusplus_yeti.xml (right-click the link to save the file).
To install: download the above file, open Notepad++ go to “View > User-Defined Dialogue…” press the button “Import…”. and open the file. Done.
Note: The “Import..” function is only supported in current versions. If your Version does not support it either upgrade (which you should anyway) or Google on how to install user defined language files in older Versions its not that much more work.
Netbeans
You can also find a basic Netbeans plugin for Netbeans 6.8 and 6.9 here: https://github.com/chrisichris/nbyeti
You can download the module (org.nbyeti-6-8-01.nbm) file from the downloads section of the above github page.
You install it like any other Netbeans-module you have downloaded – nothing special there. See the the link above for detailed installation instructions.
If you are choosing Netbeans for your Yeti-devolopment I recommend you to also use the maven-netbeans-plugin and than create a maven yeti project as described in my last blog-post. This way you have a full integrated yeti/java netbeans project within a few minutes.
I hope that helps a bit.
If you have any questions use the yeti mailing-list: http://groups.google.com/group/yeti-lang . See you there.
Chrisichris's Blog 
Posted on February 26, 2011
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