InstallJammer

I installed InstallJammer (http://www.installjammer.com/) on my Linux computer this week to develop installers for Windows versions of my ebe program.  Ebe requires gcc, gdb, gfortran and python in addition to the ebe code.  Many people would prefer a simpler installation process.  InstallJammer does the job.

InstallJammer is a Tk/tcl script with quite a long list of options for preparing an installation file/cd.  I only wanted it for Windows, but it can build installers for Linux and a variety of other operating systems.

I took me a while to guess some things which could have been easy.  To their credit the IJ team has a fairly extensive user guide, but I needed to know things like using the virtual directory <%DESKTOPDIRECTORY%> is the right choice to have an icon be placed on the desktop for all users.  I got tired of searching for that answer and started guessing.

Overall I am quite pleased with InstallJammer.  I can cope with it pretty well now.  I expect that I don't really know how to use it well.  Thumbs up!

Syntax highlighting

I have used the ply.py package by David Beazley (http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/) to implement syntax highlighting in my ebe IDE.  Ply.py is "lex and yacc for Python".  I only needed the lex part of break out the different categories of tokens.  It was fairly easy to implement highlighting code for C/C++, Fortran and Assembly.  I like the appearance of the colorful assembly code.  There was apparently a tab before the 56 in the code which I did not notice when I took the screenshot, but the colors are still nice.

Stupid tk scrollbar limit (OOPS - It's my fault)

Sometimes I love to complain.  I have been quite successful getting my ebe programming environment working.  It does a large number of editing tricks now.  I think I may have figured out most of how to use the tkinter Text widget.

Things worked great testing copy and paste until my file got over a couple of thousand lines long.  The scrollbar failed to work properly.