May 29, 2008

XPath is a neat way of navigating deep XML structures. It's like using a directory structure. /table//td gets all the TDs somewhere below TABLE. Usually, you don't need this sort of a thing for data structures, particularly in JavaScript. Something like table.td would already work. But sometimes, it does help to have something like XPath even for data structures, so I built a simple XPath-like processor for Javascript called JPath. Here are some examples of how it would work: ...

It's amazing how hard it is to get a good programming editor. I've played around with more editors/IDEs than I care to remember: e Notepad++ NoteTab SciTE Crimson Editor Komodo Eclipse Aptana ... There are four features that are critical to me. Syntax highlighting. Over time, I've found this to increase readability dramatically. Look at this piece of code with and without syntax highlighting: Doesn't the structure of the document just jump out with syntax highlighting? Anyway, I've gotten used to that. Column editing. I want to be able to do this: Being able to type across rows is incredibly useful. I use it both for programming as well as to complement data-processing on Excel. Unicode support. I often work with non-ASCII files, particularly in Tamil. Unicode support comes in handy when debugging pages for my songs site. Auto-completion. This is 10 times more productive than having to look up the manual for each function. (Oh, and it's got to be free too. Except for e Text Editor, all the others qualify.) ...