Happy birthday to me!

It’s my birthday today so I decided to do a birthday release of Afae; my present to everyone who uses Afae (both of you ;D).

The majority of the changes have been to the themes and color coding. My goal with these changes is to make the editor work, look, and feel much tighter. I think I’ve mostly accomplished the goal.

As you may know I am a big fan of Textmate and JEdit, but I also love Eclipse. The Afae editor plugin, among other things, is an attempt to emulate / merge all of those application’s good parts as much as possible. The new theme stuff brings Afae very close to being able to do syntax highlighting just like in Textmate or Aquamacs. Here is an example of Afae’s version of Brilliance Black a theme found in Textmate:

That theme is over the top for most people, but it does show off how much control you have over the text. Here is another example: the Fusion theme which emulates the old cfstudio application (a Coldfusion IDE):

Which brings me to the next part of the release. Afae currently supports a lot of file types, and now I’ve added Coldfusion back into the list of file types. I’ve had at least three people ask if I could add the Coldfusion mode back into Afae. I took the Coldfusion mode out because not only is CFEclipse a far better plugin for Coldfusion (I wrote quite a bit of it), but at one point Afae was going to complement CFEclipse so the mode was useless.

However, Afae is pretty much it’s own thing now, and I think it fills a different need than CFEclipse. I also asked Mark Drew if he was cool with it, and he was. So, if you use Coldfusion all day everyday you probably want to use CFEclipse. Afae might work for you, however, if you edit Coldfusion files every once in a while, or you don’t want a lot of extra tools (i.e. you are more of an emacs / vi kind of coder – you just want text fast).

Lastly, I updated the image viewer plugin. I made it use less graidents (it was hurting my eyes), and I made the image resizing actions actually work. It seems at some point I lost a runtime include that I didn’t notice.

I hate tooting my own horn, but the themes thing is visually really cool. Having rich color coding is something I’ve been missing for a while. Afae works so well now, that I don’t miss Textmate when working in Eclipse anymore.

You can download the new plugins on the Afae plugin page.