OK, I don't usually just post links to other sites, but this just may be the coolest low/high-tech idea ever. I'm off to try this myself…

Edit: It's worth checking out Lee's other experiments with Wiimote technology as well.

Love editing your Flash ActionScript files in jEdit, but want better debugging tools within the editor itself? Maybe you'd like to jump directly to errors indicated within your code without resorting to the Flash IDE?

Today's tip just makes me plain happy.

It may take a few minutes to set up, but it definitely shows off the power and expandability of jEdit — while also providing a heckuva nice (and long awaited) feature for us cross-platform Flashers.

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I was writing a quick answer to a reader concerning how to use jEdit to browse ActionScript code in a tree view, when I suddenly realized the current solution wasn't good enough. But after banging around on some source code this evening (and with the help of Ali Rantakari), I think I've managed to make an AS 1, 2 or 3 code browser that rivals a few I've seen on other platforms. Isn't open source wonderful?

Warning: This article goes into some depth regarding customizing jEdit, Ctags and the Sidekick plugin. If you want to be spared the details, you can always skip to the end and just reap the rewards: A shiny new code browser custom-made for ActionScript!

A little background

Unfortunately, ActionScript is not one of the 34 languages supported "out of the box" by Ctags, so we have to do a little hacking to get things to work the way we want. Thanks to the work of a few pioneers, however, it's easy enough to introduce ActionScript parsing to Ctags, and therefore, to jEdit itself.
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Thus, I've added a permanent page to Turdhead.com to provide direct links to the growing list of enhancements we've been making to jEdit lately (otherwise, these entries are likely to just disappear into the archives and remain pretty hard to find later). The "Make jEdit yours" logo at left provides the link from anywhere on Turdhead.com.

Thanks again for all the kind comments and emails, and please let us know if you've discovered something you think is worth sharing. Thanks!

We're making progress on our quest to create the perfect Mac OS X ActionScript editor: Today, we're going to integrate the Adobe AS2 and AS3 Language References directly into the open-source jEdit editor, bringing context-sensitive help files up at the stroke of a key!

The InfoViewer is basically a small browser in a floating or docked panel within jEdit. If you don't already see it, you should be able to find it under your Plugins menu. I prefer to dock mine at the right-hand side of the editor, so it stays out of the way but is generally available. You can do this by selecting the small dropdown arrow in the upper left of any floating dock and choosing which side of the interface on which to dock it:

I've created two macros — one to search for information within the ActionScript 2 reference files, and one for the ActionScript 3 files. You can install them both, or just the one that interests you (I've got them both installed myself, and I've assigned the keyboard shortcuts CMD-F1 to search the AS2 files, and SHIFT-F1 for the AS3 files). To install, you can copy the code below, or simply download and extract the files from this zipped archive and save them in your ~/.jedit/macros directory (or better yet, make a subdirectory called "ActionScript" within the macros folder and keep all your AS macros in one neat section — rather like a TextMate "bundle").
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