The Heron Editor Mini-IDE

Heron comes with a simple integrated development environment (IDE). This IDE provides basic text editing capabilities, such as found in notepad, with the following enhancements for working with Heron files:

• Syntax coloring
• On-the-fly parse error reporting
• Multi-level undo
• Single key-press to run a file
• The editor can be programmatically extended via macros (scripts) written in Heron.

Source Code

The HeronEdit IDE was written in C# and the source code is available with any download. Like the rest of Heron the source code is available for use under the MIT Licence 1.0.

Screen Shot

Extending HeronEdit

A user can run a custom macro by pressing Ctrl+M. This will open a dialog box that allows them to enter some text. This text is then passed to a Heron program called Macros.heron and is executed by the IDE.

The file Macros.heron demonstrates a very simple script that causes the currently selected text block to become commented when the user enters comment in the macro dialog box.