Bold Rewrite

I'm rewriting Bold and keeping a devlog might be fun. Every week I'll write about something I implemented, an idea I'm working through, or a technique I used. I'll write every saturday.

Why A Rewrite?

When I started I never implemented

While a lot went well such as undo/redo, fast rendering, and dealing with large files, a lot of code was meant to be a placeholder until I could better understand the problem and fully flesh out an idea. While I knew LSPs should be in a background thread because they have a lot of work to do, but I didn't think about having 'find' run in the background. It feels great to have text show immediately, but it makes it very awkward whenever keystrokes take 200+ ms. I didn't think what would happen when typing in the find bar in a 1gb log file.

It's been 5months since my last public beta. I was writing experimental GUI code, experimental LSP & DAP support, and library code as a way to relax. I'm not certain how the GUI and extension system will look like but for everything else I have a good idea. I've been meaning to rewrite code to allow multiple cursors and jumping to matching brackets across large files (something I personally want.) Now is a great time to start with an empty main file and re-architecture the whole thing. Just about everything from the not-so-trivial never-implemented list has been crossed off.

Week 1

Something new to Bold is code to generate setting. It's not fun for a user to find a settings they need to change. Browsers let you search by name or words in the description. I was thinking I should eventually implement something similar. For now, it's a bit annoying to keep the data structure name consistent with the string name consistent with the example config file. I have parsing code, so I used that to parse a simple text file that has the setting name, type, and description. The code generates an example config file, structs that I can copy into my code, and the string data in arrays so I can search it when I get around to it.

The rest of the week was getting something on the screen, writing thread communication code, and setting up my workflow. I can easily launch a script to show code coverage, I can switch to and debug a headless build, and build/run an alternative optimized build that contains my unit test so it could run the slower test fairly quickly. Being able to customize your workflow is very valuable and often the first thing I'll do.

Here's what I have so far

Until next week, Cheers