I’ve also removed the manual download. The only way to download Afae now is to use the update site (http://robrohan.com/projects/afae). If you’d used the update site before, you’ll have to uninstall the old plugins and re-setup the update site. You can read more about it on the project page.

Thank you to everyone who’s been using Afae, your feedback, and your generous donations. I really appreciate it.

I found it kind of a pain to install the plugins without an update site so I just put one together to allow easy installation. If you would like to use Afae, just point the Help > Software Update > Find and Install… and use the URL:

http://robrohan.com/projects/afae/

If you already have Afae installed this is the same version you already have, it just allows you to use the Eclipse plugin manager to install and remove Afae and makes installing on Ubuntu easier.

I was trying to use the tool git-svnimport to move the Afae code out of the SVN repository and into git to retain the history, but that tool requires some Perl modules that I just can’t figure out how to get working. I am not a perl fan (like, at all), and after much googling, tweaking, compiling, CPAN madness, nothing I do seemed to fix the error:

Can't locate SVN/Core.pm in @INC ...

So while the git repositories have all the current code, they have no history.

I am also in the process of making some life changes which involve me getting out of technology altogether. As a result, I wont be working on anything not related to my job. Long way around, that means I am not working on Afae anymore (or any open source project), and I’ve personally moved all my development work over to Textmate (meaning I am not using Afae myself anymore).

Afae is a great tool. I see Afae as a nice IDE for Linux. It gives a nice editor for all kinds of files that gedit doesn’t support, and the blogging plugin is better than most of the normal Linux blogging editors out there. I hope someone finds it useful.

I did a quick look around today to see if Afae seems to be at all interesting to people, and it seems like it is at least slightly interesting.

The editor part of Afae has been downloaded 3502 times - that doesn’t mean that that many people use it though. Those are stats on the nightly downloads so there are probably quite a few repeat offenders in there. But it’s safe to say there are at least 6 people are using Afae :).

The uptake of the other plugins are still respectable, but far smaller:

• Xml Compiler - 1726
• Snippets - 1681
• Image Viewer - 1656
• Blogger - 321

The blogger plugin is the newest plugin, but it seems slow on the uptake.

On Eclipse Plugin Central Afae is still listed on the 3 month Top Rated list ( to my surprise, slightly beating out CFEclipse in that category :-o ):

If you are one of those six people using Afae, I am working towards doing a 1.0 release (mostly because I need to branch the code to add code folding and some other deeply rooted changes). Right now, these are the only items before 1.0. If you have any bugs or suggestions for 1.0 please let me know (new features, if you want to suggest some, will go into 2.0 unless there is a must have).

By the way, I did a quick test with Afae in 3.3M5 and it seems to work fine.

I also got wind of this German site which noted the same problem. Here is a shot of it working with Chinese. I am sure German should work just as well now.

Eventually, I’ll make it ask the workspace for the proper selected encoding (the one set in preferences), but for now I just changed it to do UTF-8. Most people are using UTF-8 now anyway. Plus, I seem to have more luck with people in other countries using my software :)

And as a final test… 再见！

(Note: if you are running wordpress, make sure you update to the latest version)

Update: The post getting code is updated; however, the posting code is still set to ISO-8859-1. While you can now load posts in UTF-8 you can not post in UTF-8. That makes this updated a little less than useful.

Update: The posting in UTF-8 works on my test Debain box, but not on my live Red Hat box, so I assume that I have my Red Hat box improperly configured. The UTF-8 posting seems to work in some environments but not others. Your mileage may vary.

While it is somewhat more efficient in Textmate because almost everything in Textmate can be found in the menus, it does work in Eclipse, and it’s quite useful.

Here is a movie of it working with Eclipse.

To get this setup you’ll want to configure Quicksilver like this, and then you can follow along with the movie to setup the Current Application > Show Menu Items short cut (I have mine set to Option A).

If you use Mac, and you’ve never used Quicksilver, you might want to check it out. It’s like spotlight on steroids double plus.

• SQL syntax highlighting in cfquery blocks with <cfqueryparam> coloring as well.
• Auto close on tags, but not on tags like cfset or cfelse
• CFScript syntax highlighting (well, it looks really close anyway)
• Javascript and style coloring in javascript and style blocks.

I was impressed with how well he got it to look. The code coloring is as good as CFEclipse in the early days (todays CFEclipse coloring is far, far better than Afae’s). It’s not perfect, and probably never will be because Afae is not an editor specific to Coldfusion, but it’s definitely usable for day to day tasks.

Here is what the new mode looks like colored with Ron’s new theme Fusion II (Note: show whitespace is on, which is not required):

As a little joke I added a theme called Love Is Alive. Not sure if anyone will get the joke though. Here is what it looks like:

You can download the updated version on the Afae plugin page

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.

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).

The file upload has more uses than just blogging. For example, often times my IM file transfer fails when I want to send someone a screen shot, but now I can just drag, drop, command+v.

Here is a movie on how the file upload works and a quick demo:

Some other things that were fixed / added.

• Progress dialogs when posting / uploading
• Confirm that you want to post something that doesn’t look like a blog post (i.e. if you click “Post to blog” when looking at a java sorce file)
• The delete posting feature was removed - I am not going to implement that. Delete is a strong operation, and if you want to do that you can log into your site ;)

As ususal you can download all the Afae plugin’s on the Afae Page.

To get blogging to work in it’s minimal form, you need the afae_editor_blogger_nightly.zip plugin. That will give you the ability to post to your metaWeblog enabled blog and upload files.

If you’d like color coding for your posts you can download the afae_editor_nightly.zip. The editor plugin does color coding for blog posts and many other file types. Or, you can use your favorite Eclipse HTML editor by assigning it to the file type “.blog”.

If you’d like the snippet ability - the part where I type img and it becomes an image HTML tag - you can download afae_snippets_nightly.zip (If you use cfeclipse, as I am sure you know, you already have this ablity).

Lastly, this has been tested quite a bit on Mac OS X connecting to a WordPress blog only. While I think it should work with other configurations, I can’t say for sure. If you find it works on your setup, please let me know.

There are several different licenses for the plugins, but they are all either under the Apache, LGPL, MIT, or Eclipse. Check out the Wiki for more information.

Update: I tested this on Windows XP and the file upload portion does not work on Windows at present (because the file separator of “\” is breaking a regular expression).
Update: The file uploader works on Windows XP.

Update: I tested this on Linux and entry posting and file uploading works fine (Ubuntu).