According to some recent posts, the upgrade to OSX Lion and its functionality with Corona involves the "upgrade" to XCode 4.x as well. As more developers shift over to Lion in general, they will inevitably be roped into XCode4, and eventually it will become mandatory in conjunction with iOS5, etc.

So I guess it's time to say "bye" to my old faithful XCode3. Unfortunately, I relied upon XCode3 as my Lua editor too. With the free plugin for syntax coloring, and the nice pull-down menu for functions, it was practically an ideal editing environment.

XCode4 is reportedly lousy as a code editor for anything except Obj-C or C++, if it works at all. I know for a fact that it doesn't work with the Lua syntax coloring plugin that worked so beautifully in version 3.

So the question is, what now? What code editor are Lion/Corona users now switching to? I located various options, but some of them cost upwards of $50! While I can "afford" that, it seems almost obscene. $50 for a basic code editor? Come off it!

I don't ask for much. I just need a basic code editor which colors Lua syntax. A simple way to locate/browse functions would be really nice too (XCode3 did so via a convenient pull-down menu at the top). I don't need debugging or code wrapping or error checking or anything extra like that... I can debug my own code, thank you very much. :)

Any advice Lion/XCode4 users?

Thanks!

I use fraise and it's free :) http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33751/fraise

Textwrangler is also popular (also free) : http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

TextWrangler, IndeED on Mac
Notepad++ on Windows

You can try Sublime Text, it's a really nice editor.

But I use Lua plugin for IntelliJ Idea and have to say it's fantastic! I'm quite convinced that at the moment it's the best (in terms of features, anyway) Lua IDE there is, but it needs more exposure. IntelliJ has a free Community Edition and the plugin itself is free. Over the past year it was rapidly developed and the developer has been very responsive to my requests and bug reports.

I once accidentally deleted the project folder with my game I've been working on for over two months and the latest backup was over a week old. But since this Lua IDE is actually a plugin for IntelliJ Idea it takes advantage of IntelliJ's features, like Local History. Local History basically keeps track of all changes in your project (internal and external) and you can roll back to previous state very easily. So when I tried several data recovery tools and pretty much said goodbye to my game, I learned about Local History, rolled back to yesterday and my project was saved :)

Here it is:
https://bitbucket.org/sylvanaar2/lua-for-idea/wiki/Home

I use Komodo Edit

Everybody, please also file an Enhancement Request for Lua support in Xcode at
https://bugreport.apple.com

You can refer to my bug number: 9321859
(My bug entry is mirrored at Open Radar: http://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=1327401)

Apple counts the number of people that request the same feature. The more duplicates they get, the better. I am suspicious that nobody in the Corona community has actually filed a bug. This needs to happen before Apple will fix this. And I think there are enough Corona users that if everybody filed a bug, this could actually make a difference.

Also, any time this topic comes up on the forum, please remind people to do this.

I use IndeED from Whitesky Games

http://whiteskygames.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/indeed-release-3-is-available/

It's not like super awesome but it's pretty good.

Larry

:-) Thanks Larry, it will get better. I am just very very busy atm.

IndeED looks really good... can't wait to try it.

Mike Hart, I am sure it will. I use it all the time.

I don't know that You really need to convert it for Windows since there are plugins that work with Visual Studio, which I use on Windows.

just FYI.

Larry
doubleSlashDesign.com

Time is what I need. At the moment I am working on a project that pays. And has tight deadlines. So there is no time for anything else.

I use Lazarus for it and on the window side some things of Lazarus don't work like I use them on the OSX side. These are bugs of Lazarus which I need to study and find workarounds for it. One thing for an example is the function list. On OSX, there is an IDLE timer component. As soon as you don't do anything in IndeED, like maybe 200 milliseconds, the timer calls a function to update the function list. Well on Windows this component never fires. Also windows has different places to store options. At the beginning I didn't structure my code to port IndeED. So some things were hard coded. And IndeED stores a lot of options, I can tell you. The settings for the syntax highlighting component alone fill a page.

Mike, it would be great if you could split out the IndeED configuration into files so it would be easy for others to update (syntax and function definitions)

Yes, that would be a good thing to do.