ZeroBrane Studio Lua IDE v1.40 is out; updated LÖVE API for 0.10.1

[D0NM]

It seems, zbs searches the love executable in the parent folder of my zbs project, because it worked out of the box without the need to configure anything inside zbs.

We were talking about
selecting "root folder" and the Lua interpreter for the current project.
That you click on a random .LUA file in your folders, adjust the whole project root path and the interpreter
to be able to run/debug if from ZBS.

I change ZBS configs, there is no problem to make it work with LOVE 0.10.1
This spring I tried ZBS on Win XP/7/8/8.1 and 10. It works fine.

[paulclinger]

> The most confusing thing for children was
> to set proper root folder / Lua framework.

@D0NM, I pushed a change to ZeroBrane Studio github repository that will offer to switch the project directory if it can't find main.lua in the current project, but finds it in the same directory as the current file (which should work well most of the time). This way when the users open main.lua and try to run the project, they will get prompted to switch the project to the current location and the project will launch as expected. Give it a try and let me know if you notice any issues. This change will be included in the next release.

[Fuzzlix]

Speaking of tips and tricks, the debugger (at least the LOVE one) has a nasty side-effect of a giant slowdown.

It took me roughly half an hour of googling (note: googling, looking at the site failed to point me to the correct page) to learn about require("mobdebug").off and .on

The warning about a possible slowdown and the tip for selective debugging should be up there easily findable and not buried in a debugging article for some language I don't even know about.

One more thought about debugging in ZBS: For me i distinguish between "debugging-lite" and "full-debugging"

-- full debugging: pro: i can do single step debugging. cons: VERY slow. ... but sometimes nessesary

-- debugging-lite: I run my love app as without debugging and use print() to send some information to the zbs output window. It is fast and the printed informations helped in most cases to find the bug. IMPORTANT: you should place the following line in a apropriate place in your code, eg. in love.load()

Code: Select all

io.stdout:setvbuf("no"); -- send printed text without delay to the console.

Also a nicer print function helps a lot:

Code: Select all

local function dprint(str, ...)
  print(str:format(...));
end;
dprint("x=%s, y=%s", x, y) -- example call

This lite debugging mode already saved a lot of my time

[paulclinger]

@Fuzzlix, good idea about debugging-lite; there is another option, which is in a way between full debugging and debugging lite.

ZBS has Real-time Watch plugin, which allows to show printed output as a Watch value, which is useful for some data that changes quickly and may produce too much output in the Output window. It also continues to work even after you turn the debugging off, so you can do `require("mobdebug").start() require("mobdebug").off()` to get normal performance and use the plugin to get the values in the Watch panel. You just need to do `print("foo=", whatever)` and should see the "foo" added as the watch (with the value changing while your app is running).

[Sulunia]

I have only one reason why i won't switch to using ZeroBrane:

zer.png (4.13 KiB) Viewed 4755 times

This.

not.png (7.01 KiB) Viewed 4755 times

And this.

This just triggers me so deeply I can't even.

[paulclinger]

@Sulunia, could you clarify what I should be looking at in these screenshots? If you mean the fold continuing to include the empty lines, it's the default setting, but you can change that by adding `editor.foldcompact = false` to the config.

[Sulunia]

@Sulunia, could you clarify what I should be looking at in these screenshots? If you mean the fold continuing to include the empty lines, it's the default setting, but you can change that by adding `editor.foldcompact = false` to the config.

That's exactly it.
Many thanks!

[Fuzzlix]

I do this "editor.foldcompact = true" too. Its much more intuitive and saves space on screen. May be better defaults in ZBS increase acceptance for newbies. There was a lot of settings i had to tweak in my user.ini, to feel confortable with ZBS. This tweeking is relatively complicated, because zbs lacks a configuration dialog window for the most important settings.

[D0NM]

@D0NM, I pushed a change to ZeroBrane Studio github repository that will offer to switch the project directory if it can't find main.

This is very nice of u. Thanks!!

[paulclinger]

> There was a lot of settings i had to tweak in my user.ini, to feel confortable with ZBS. This tweeking is relatively complicated, because zbs lacks a configuration dialog window for the most important settings.

I do plan several improvements to the config management, but I dislike configuration GUI panels and the improvements planned are focused on providing more rapid feedback on those changes that can be shown quickly (like font/color/size changes), on eliminating the need to restart in most cases, and on searching for the appropriate configuration setting (similar to how fuzzy search works for files and symbols).