Apparently, I’ve had this urge lately to get Afae squared away.

My wife went out of town this weekend so I pulled an all-weekender to fix some of the bugs with the editor that have been annoying me. I also updated the blogging plugin’s file uploader to work on Windows.

I added an implementation of one of the most requested features. The request was to support regular expressions in the rules file – jedit’s SPAN_REGEXP. Because Eclipse is setup differently than jedit, the tag behaves a bit differently in Afae, but it does the job most of the time. If you’re one of the folks who requested its inclusion, and want to play with it, be sure to checkout the wiki.

Along the same lines, I fixed most of the other SPAN and SEQ rules to support more of the jedit attributes; specifically IGNORE_CASE, AT_LINE_START, DELEGATE, EXCLUDE_MATCH, and NO_WORD_BREAK. This means that a lot of small syntax problems are now gone – entity references vs. just an & coloring correctly for example.

After the rules update, I updated a few of the mode files to make better use of the new rules, and I am quite pleased with the results. The modes I’ve gotten to so far are mostly the htmlish web modes like PHP, RHTML, HTML, ASP, JSP, JS, CSS, Ruby, etc. In addition to the web style rules, I added better support for .properties and .ini files.

The Editor no longer has “that weird drop down at the top that seems to do nothing.” It was a feature I was going to add, but I took it out of the mix.

I use Afae all day everyday, so most of this stuff was to scratch my own itch – but if that guy from IBM is still trying to get that Basic syntax coloring to work, you’ll probably have a lot better luck now (sorry I lost your email).

You can download the newer plugins on the Afae plugin page. There is new stuff in the Editor, the Blogging Plugin, the snippets, and if you are building your own syntax file, the XML compiler has the new Afae syntax and can validate your XML files.

Here are a few screen shots of the PHP mode (one with the Plastic theme and one with the Blackboard theme).