Check out more recent articles to see how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Stacks.

I've been enjoying my first few days with the new OS X 10.5 operating system (aka Leopard), and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the development community is going to be able to do with the hundreds of cool new features and API hooks built into the OS. But that said: Does anybody really think that the "Stacks" feature has been well implemented in Leopard?

I was actually looking forward to using Stacks: Along with Time Machine (which it turns out is currently useless on my existing network storage system), it was one of the things that drew me to buy the latest upgrade as soon as possible. But it turns out that "stacks" are just folders — not smart folders, and not "on the fly" collections of files. Just folders. And really, really, really sh*tty looking ones, at that.

What the hell are these supposed to be? I challenge anyone to identify these folders!

I won't go into details here, as I'm sure anyone looking for more info will find it in abundance elsewhere on the Web (The entire Ars Technica review is a great read, by the way).

In fact, Leopard is indeed a great system, but the two main things that Apple has been using to promote it to the masses — Time Machine and Stacks — have turned out to be sorely disappointing. I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to get Time Machine to work on a networked drive soon enough, so I'm not actually worried about that one. After all, we've already seen "fixes" for other features, such as this fix to disable the miserable 3D Dock.

But Stacks? Stacks just sucks.

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!