Tuesday 25 August 2009

Padre 0.44 released!

Hi everyone!

I'm happy to announce Padre, The Perl IDE, release 0.44. Since last week, azawawi++ kept his work frenzy going and added several neat features to Padre this week:

  • Help Search is now greatly enhanced, faster and even supporting help for Perl operators!

  • Padre now has an integrated "Quick Fix" feature for Perl code! Perl 5 quick fixes are still getting mature but we're all very excited on new ideas to help Modern Perl coding and beginners.

  • The Directory Browser has had several stability fixes as well, and is turning into a better feature each day.
Aside from the usual bugfixes from all Padre devs, other features worth noticing include the return of the F12 "save as" shortcut from szabgab++ and the new "Edit->Insert" menu option from teejay++ that let's you insert snippets and special values like today's date, file size, etc.

This release is also special because we're experimenting on a new "stable" release process. The 0.45 release is scheduled for the end of the week and will contain only bugfixes and translation improvements from 0.44. This will let us create "stable" packages for linux distros and different operating systems (such as win32), while still letting us work on bleeding-edge stuff (released about the same time, but as 0.46).

Many thanks to everyone that contributed to this release - be it developing Padre or just using it and giving us bug reports. Thanks everyone!

Padre 0.44 should arrive at your local CPAN mirror anytime now. Enjoy!


newcomer notice: in the programming community, specially in those that use IRC as a communication channel, it is common to use "++" at the end of someone's name/nickname to indicate praise for that person's work, that you acknowledge and are thankful for what they did in whatever topic you are writing about. It is a standard iteration to variables in several programming languages such as C and Perl, so we use it to say (what they did) increased their "magic value" - usually called "karma". So if you see yournick++ somewhere, be glad :)

Monday 17 August 2009

Padre 0.43 released!

Padre 0.43 was (finally) released! Only 16 days after our birthday release, we already have a lot of new features and several improvements, starting with a beautiful splash screen. Maybe we change the image on a somewhat regular basis like the Gimp project does, who knows? :-)

On the "new stuff that you're gonna love", we have:

  • "Quick menu access" option that let's you quickly browse through and select menu options without ever leaving the keyboard. Just press Ctrl-3 and start typing!
  • "Open Resource" option is also a great help to quickly find files inside any resources directory. Just type Ctrl-Shift-R and off you go.
  • Padre's search engine has been refactored and is dazzling fast! Also, if you select text (1 line or less) and press F3, it will do an active search for the selected entry without even invoking the Find dialog.
  • The directory browser now has an "open in file browser" option that opens the requested file/folder in your default file browser. Just right-click on any item on the directory tree to view the option (among others).
  • If you have Syntax Checking enabled, you can now use the new "Next Problem" option that points you to the line where the (next) detected problem is!
  • All PPI-based features now fully support perl 5.10.
  • The new Help Search option (F2) let's you browse through perl's documentation with ease.

We also had a lot of work on the "Important stuff that's not so visible" category, like reducing our dependencies, upgrading plugin support internals, testing and bug-fixing.

As usual, many many thanks to all Padre developers and translators for all their work (join us if you haven't already), and to all the users out there - the Padre project would not be half what it is without you!


Cheers, and until next time!