Macro language

[Matze]

Hello!

I find Perl not at all usable for me, too much. And the menu commands are not enough to create sth more advanced.

I am curious to know why Perl is the macro-language for NWE. I can remember, that some years ago Nisus has asked NW-users to vote for a macrolanguage: did Perl really win this election? Or was it a 2000-bush-a-like vote?

Would a macrolanguage as the one in NW still be possible?

Best, Matze

[charles]

Hi Matze:

Perl was chosen for NWE for a number of reasons. The biggest two were its very power text processing capabilities and its popularity. The idea was that a person could more easily find documentation on this language than any home-grown language we could come up with.

We have generally had two kinds of requests for changes to our macro support. One request has been to allow people to use other scripting languages such as Ruby or Shell instead of just Perl. The other has been to provide some kind of language that can deal more directly with formatted text and is more understandable to non-programmers.

We are working on satisfy both of these requests. At some point, maybe in the next release if we have the time, you will be able to write macros in any languages accessible from the OS X terminal including Ruby, Shell, Python and others. Our next release will also include greatly expanded support for AppleScript, which will provide an easy-to-use language that can work directly on text and access the Find and Replace engine.

-Charles

[Matze]

Hi Matze:

Perl was chosen for NWE for a number of reasons. The biggest two were its very power text processing capabilities and its popularity. The idea was that a person could more easily find documentation on this language than any home-grown language we could come up with.

I am not at all a programmer and I could handle NWs macrolanguage well enough to create what I needed (and if not, there were Kino, Philip and other helpful souls out there) With Perl I have the feeling that I need half a dozen documentations to understand Perl's basics.

We have generally had two kinds of requests for changes to our macro support. One request has been to allow people to use other scripting languages such as Ruby or Shell instead of just Perl.

My request besides the choice of languages is that Nisus will come up with a wider range of usefull macros. In NW we had tons of wildley posted macros that would have been a killer for the program if they should have been provided in different folders with the softwareupdates.

The other has been to provide some kind of language that can deal more directly with formatted text and is more understandable to non-programmers.

For me it seems as if the opposite is the state of the art now. In NW you could deal with formated text directly and very easily via f/r and its macroize button. ( I am glad to read that this will be possible in future versions of NWE) Now in NWE it seems rather very complex to me.

Our next release will also include greatly expanded support for AppleScript, which will provide an easy-to-use language that can work directly on text and access the Find and Replace engine.

-Charles

Promising!

Best Matze

[JBL]

The poll doesn't seem to include my choice: improved AppleScript support. However,

Our next release will also include greatly expanded support for AppleScript, which will provide an easy-to-use language that can work directly on text and access the Find and Replace engine.

This is great news. I don't know that AppleScript is really that easy to use unless the application is recordable, but with some good sample scripts this should be good for my purposes. Are you planning expanding the search function so that it is possible to search for particular formatting?

[charles]

Hi JBL:

Adding formatting based search is definitely on our list, but there is a very easy way you can do something similar right now in some cases. Just select some text that contains the attributes you want then click on the little icons at the bottom of your window (called tags). These will show a menu with a number of commands including "Select All". You can then use Find/Replace in selection to further narrow your selection based on the text. I know this is not exactly the same thing, but for the most common reasons someone might need to use formatted searching, this often does the trick.

-Charles

[JBL]

I was specifically thinking about using this feature in a macro. To do that I think you want to specify the style you are searching for in the macro.

[charles]

Hi JBL:

We will keep this in mind as we further develop our scripting support also. Thanks for your feedback!

-Charles