I'm wondering if there is a way to store common blocks of code in PHP Storm so you can easily paste them later. I don't particularly want to use the extended Clipboard as that eventually goes away.
It would be great if I could store it and set a hot key so I can easily paste it.
Is this possible?
You have multiple options which you can mix and match. In descending order of usefulness (IMHO):
Live Templates are perhaps the most flexible, allowing operations on cursor, selection and more
Tools - Save file as template
Scratch files
Version control shelf (window Version Control, tab Local Changes, right click modified file, click Shelve)
Related
Background: I am working with Angular (but my problem is not particular to any language or framework). In Angular, each component requires four separate files. So, we often find ourselves with 40+ files open. But, most of these files can be tiny, less than 20 lines each.
Many IDEs allow you to open your files in multiple windows. Each window can have a different panel, and each panel can have different tabs. This is great, but honestly, still isn't enough.
What I want: In addition to windows, panels, and tabs, I'd like to add another level of organization.
I speculate this has probably existed for decades, but I just don't know what it's called. At the very least, I speculate this has existed at least since Angular was a thing.
For example, here is a screenshot of VSCode with four files open across four panels. (Code taken from Angular dynamic component tutorial):
And here is a quick mockup showing what I'm looking for. Four files are open, but the three shortest ones are "concatenated" into one editor. Arrow-key down from the bottom of one file will bring you to the first line of the next file.
Notably, these files are not actually concatenated on-disk.
TLDR: What text editor can allow me to edit multiple files as if they were concatenated, as in the mockup above?
If the files stay as separate windows/tabs, the file editor would have to shrink each tab to a minimal height, and then tile them vertically. If any editor can do it, I suspect it would be emacs or vim. You might also be able to do it by opening separate editor windows and using a tiling window manager.
We can achieve a similar effect with some text editing magic. It would be something like:
Add a header to each file consisting of a unique separator (e.g. # === magic separator === filename my_file.js ===)
Use cat to combine all the files into one file
Edit this one file
When done, use the separator to break them up and put the text back into the original files
You could easily write some scripts for combining and splitting so you can do it quickly. You can also set up a background script that automatically runs the splitter as you edit the combined file. However, the combined file would essentially be a new file, so you could not view changes on it with git, and VS Code's CodeLens/Inline blame wouldn't work.
One option would be to develop your codebase with the combined files checked in to VCS, and then only have the splitter script as part of your "build" step. So you would make your changes, run ./build.sh which splits the files into some temp directory, and then run your application from there.
Lastly, and I hate to be snide, but the fact is that this problem is best solved by avoiding poorly designed frameworks that do not consider developer ergonomics. Many other languages give the developer much freedom and many tools to organize their code as they wish, rather than imposing constraints like requiring many small components to be in separate files. Java for example also had a similar problem (dunno if more recent versions fixed it) - you can only have one class per file, which creates a huge mess if you like having many small files. C# does not have this limitation and as a result C# codebases can be much tidier than Java codebases.
In Weblate I find myself unable to edit the source strings in the GUI, because they are flagged as "read only". I imagine that a manual way would be to manually edit the source files and push them up, outside of Weblate. But that requires some understanding of the chosen format (gettext in my case).
Is there any way to do this in the GUI? I would prefer some way that propagates the change across all the languages.
Currently, there is no way to do this inside Weblate for bilingual translation files. In these, the strings are extracted from the source code while doing some transformations (in your case using xgettext), so editing the source code is not a task that would be easy to automate inside Weblate.
I am trying to make a dynamic PDF generator as an .NET Core API. I want to take an existing PDF, or .docx file, and edit it so it replaces the current name (John Doe) with something that can be replaced like #NAME_PLACEHOLDER.
I then want to transform #NAME_PLACEHOLDER -> John Doe (or whatever is in the KeyValuePair or Dictionary<string, string>).
I am running this on a Docker environment, so I can easily execute commands and I am willing to do that as well.
So far I have tried a few things:
1) pdf2htmlEX
Executes as pdf2htmlEX file.pdf
Does the job pretty well
Can be converted back to PDF using Google Chrome headless or similar
Problem: Only the characters used in the PDF can be used to replace. So if I only use A, B, C as characters, it will make D into Times New Roman (or default font)
2) LibreOffice ODT to PDF
This was pretty nice, because I could simply unzip the .odt file, open content.xml, search and replace, then save it as an .odt file again
Could be converted into PDF rather easily using soffice --convert-to pdf
LibreOffice is quite nice
Problem 1: Microsoft Word -> Save as ODT tends to break the formatting, so we have to use LibreOffice to go and change it back again
Problem 2: We don't want to move away from Microsoft's Office suite
3) HTML to PDF using Chrome Headless
What you see is what you get
By far the best option, if we're all developers aaand have unlimited time
Problem 1: Only our developers can make changes, since our marketing department do not know HTML
Problem 2: Our existing PDFs would have to be rewritten in HTML
As you can see, I have tried a bunch of things. None of them, except Chrome Headless, has lived up to my expectations. What I really like about #3 is what you see is what you get. I can make the whole thing in HTML, press CTRL+P and see what it looks like as a finished PDF, basically.
I am looking for a better solution, though. It can be paid. It can be free. All I need is to change out words/phrases with other words dynamically, which apparently seems like a tough thing to do.
Thanks for specifying what you've already found clearly. It helps a lot providing a succinct answer.
The conversion is always tricky - I'm sure you know Word has trouble displaying/editing some Word documents itself.
I have experience regarding point #2 "LibreOffice ODT to PDF" and can suggest a few things to test:
Don't use Microsoft to do the docx->odt conversion. It's not good as you know. Use LibreOffice itself to do this step. The rest of your process remains the same.
For some documents, Libre Office does doc->odt much better. So, you can instead work with DOC format and get a better result without any other changes.
You won't be able to remove the devs from the process, but you can certainly reduce their role allowing your business/marketing teams to have more direct input simply by:
get the starting point document to the devs to run through the conversion process. The devs can "clean up" the document to make it convert nicely.
make this version of the document the "official" starting point. The business or technical teams can load it, adjust it, and put it back into the process.
if possible, expose a test-platform to the business teams so they can download, adjust, upload and render to PDF. This cycle means they will be able to achieve more and if they're good, do impressive stuff without any dev input.
the above steps simply mean don't expect perfect conversion of arbitrary complex documents. Starting from a (even complex) working baseline is great.
Some of that might show you that your #2 is actually going to get the best overall results.
I hope that helps.
Part of my job right now is to build some dynamic functionalities into Microsoft Office documents. The only means I've found to do this is through VBA - and thus, the VBA editor which comes built in to Office docs.
The VBA editor is awful. It's missing a million different functionalities that modern development environments need to support. But the worst part is that I'm a hard-core Vim lover, and the VBA editor is barely any better than notepad.
So: Is there any way I can effectively use Vim to do VBA programming? Short of copy-pasting my code into the VBA editor from a different window when I want to try it?
I've never used the VBA editor, but here's something I've done with MS Visual Studio. (MSVS's editor does have some nice features, but I still prefer vim for most editing.)
I open or create the source file in MSVS. I then get the full path to the file (by right-clicking on the tab and selecting "Copy Full Path"), and open the same file in vim in a different window.
I use alt-tab to bounce back and forth between vim and MSVS. When I make a change in vim, I use :w to write the change, then alt-tab back to MSVS. The MSVS editor notices that the file has changed on disk and offers to read the updated version.
Alternatively, if I change the file in MSVS, I write the file (File > Save ...), then alt-tab to vim and use :e! to read the updated file into the vim buffer.
There's no need to copy-paste the code, since both editors are operating on the same disk file. I just have to be very careful not to make changes in both vim and MSVS without writing the file to disk.
It's ugly, and it's not for everyone, but it works for me. Maybe it will work for you.
I use Cygwin, so it's actually a little more complicated; Cygwin programs, including vim, don't recognize Windows-style paths. I can do this:
vi $(cygpath 'WINDOWS_PATH')
where WINDOWS_PATH is pasted from the full path I get from MSVS. The single quotes are necessary to keep the shell from interpreting the \ characters. If you're using a Windows native vim, this step isn't necessary.
That's an interesting opinion. I used VI briefly about fifteen years ago and based on that I contend that the VBA editor is far more suited to its purpose than VI (or VIM?) would be. Is there one particular piece of functionality that it is missing from the VBA editor that precludes you effectively using it for its purpose (editing VBA)? VBA has not been enhanced for many many years, but the fact is it can't be killed off because everyone finds it so easy to use.
If you wish you can write some piece of code in your preferred language that manipulates your word document via COM objects (if it supports that). Then you can call your external piece of code from a simple stub within your Word document. You need to get around some security constraints though in your Word document.
For example I could write some code in VBScript or VBA or Powershell or .Net that manipulates a word doc. I can call that from a small piece of VBA (that might be attached to a button or something in the standard word toolbar)
My app currently reads a script containing instructions on what the app should do next. Think of it this way ---> My app is like an orchestra, and when it is passed sheet music (the script), it knows what to do. The sheet defines what different parts of the orchestra do at different times.
Currently, writing the script by hand is tedious. I want to be able to define chunks, which I can drag and drop from my gui to the script. I was wondering if there already is tools which let you do something like this, or if I should write my own tool.
Basically, when I click on something in the gui, it should insert a template into my plist, which I can tweak.
EDIT: It looks like the ability to create "Property list Structure Definitions" is what I am after. I have tried searching the apple site, but I can't find any documentation.
Two things come to mind:
You don't mention what format the input is in, nor what you want the GUI tool to do beyond letting you "drag chunks". But if you can define your format into an XML schema, then you can use any number of XML authoring tools that customize their interface based on schema. Also gives you the ability to make it easy to let the UI enter parameters/customization, which your script language likely has. Final bonus: you might be able to convert script directly into a plist with a simple XSLT file.
Check out Briefs, which is a prototyping application for iOS apps that has a similar architecture.