I’ve stirred up quite a bit of controversy with my “What I Hate about the Xojo Navigator” blog post. Despite the various things I dislike about the Navigator there are some things I like about it and that I would hope that if Xojo Inc makes changes to the Navigator we don’t lose these items. This post will be about those things.
Multiple Select Copy/Paste
One of my biggest beefs in Real Studio was that it was very tedious to copy anything from one object, or one project, to another. You had to select the singular object, copy, and then paste it wherever you needed it. Depending upon the version of Real Studio you could sometimes copy the entire group of methods and properties but it was never very reliable in my experience.
In Xojo, this problem is mostly eliminated because you can select multiple items in the Navigator, copy, and then paste wherever. Not only does a continuous block of selections work but non-continuous selections work too. This, of course, assumes that copy/paste works since the keyboard shortcuts don’t always work as you expect (but it’s getting better), and sometimes it depends on where you try to paste on whether the paste actually works or not.
For example, if I select a WebPage and then a single method and copy it and then go to another project and without selecting anything I use the Paste command. The WebPage is pasted but the method is not. However, if I have an object selected, like say the App object, the WebPage is pasted and the solitary method that I copied is pasted into the App object. So while it’s a very powerful new tool in the arsenal, it’s possible to get some very confusing results.
Filter
The other thing that I like about the Navigator is the Filter search field. This let’s me quickly find the objects in my project that match the name I’ve typed in. This is really handy when finding your control subclasses or container controls since the Library (sadly) does not show those.
Finding an object in Real Studio was hard. Our projects are loaded with nested folders and namespaced objects. I sometimes remembered the name and location of a particular class but digging through the various folders was a waste of time so I usually searched the project for the name, found the object in the search tab, double clicked to open it in an editor, and then switched back to the Project Tab. Most of the time the parent folders would be expanded and the object was selected. Usually I’d have to scroll the Project Tab list to view it, though.
The Navigator Filter eliminates that goose chase. What’s interesting is that if you type ‘open’ it will find all objects, methods, properties, etc, that contain ‘open’ in the name. However, if you were to type ‘.open’ it finds nothing. This limits its effectiveness and forces you to you the global Search function. In my ideal world ‘.open’ would find object ‘open’ methods.
Effectively, the Filter function is just a specialized search. The only difference is that the Filter doesn’t look in source code (just definitions) while Search looks at everything. This isn’t a bad thing but I hadn’t thought about it much until I wrote this up.
Conclusion
Could both of these functions been added to Real Studio? I believe so. Presumably, there was some technical issue that made the multiple select a problem in Real Studio or they would have implemented it long ago (it was a highly requested feature). The filter could also have been implemented but because the Real Studio project tab doesn’t show methods it wouldn’t make sense, but you accomplished the same thing by using the global search.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Xojo during the Release 3 beta cycle. I also spent about 50% of my time using Real Studio 2012 R2.1 for an older client project that may or may not get updated to Xojo. Real Studio looks really ‘old’ at this point where Xojo looks ‘right’ though I will be happy when the monochrome icons/colors phase leaves the industry.
What features of the Xojo Navigator do you really like?
