What’s Your Preference?
Posted: June 15, 2007 Filed under: Don Yantzi, Remote Systems LPEX Editor, RSE, WDSC 8 CommentsWDSC comes with a smattering of preferences that can be customized to tweak the workbench to your liking. The good news is they are all centralized in a single dialog (Window > Preferences). The bad news is there are lots of preference and finding the one you want can be a challenge.
Of course that assumes you already know that such a preference exists. That is why I sometimes just browse through all the preference pages. It’s amazing the stuff you can learn just by doing this. Obviously you learn what preferences exist, but quite often I find a preference for a function I didn’t even know existed!
To be honest, I don’t customize that many preferences. But there are a few that I change immediately whenever I create a new workspace (of course now I’ll just export / import them). So here are my top preferences:
- Background color for the currenLine in LPEX (LPEX Editor > Appearance). The default for this is a light blue which I find hard to see. So I always change this to yellow so it’s very easy to see which line the cursor is on.
- Editor font size (LPEX Editor > Appearance for LPEX and General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts for other editors). Dropping the font size 1 or 2 points is a great way to crank out a bit more screen real estate from my ThinkPad screen.
- Enable all capabilities (General > Capabilities). The idea of having capabilities that could be turned on / off seemed like a good idea initially. But I find it gets in the way more often than not, so I just enable all of them.
- Keyboard shortcuts (General > Keys). I always use Ctrl + m to maximize / minimize editors and views and it drives me crazy that it doesn’t work for LPEX (because LPEX overrides it for some other action). So I always go here and remove the Ctrl + m assignment from LPEX. Warning: doing this will also disable whatever action LPEX has assigned to the Ctrl + m keyboard shortcut.
- Templates (Remote Systems > Remote Systems LPEX Editor > iSeries Parsers > …. for LPEX and Java > Editor > Templates for Java). I use these mostly for my Java development to insert the standard IBM copyrights into each new file.
- PDE Target Platform (Plug-in Development > Target Platform). We use Eclipse to develop WDSC, so often we are running two copies of the workbench at the same time (one where we write the code and the other where the code is running). So I download a plain vanilla version of Eclipse to write my Java code and point the Target Platform preference at the most recent version of WDSC I have installed. Then the code I write overrides the version of the code in the WDSC I have pointed to when I run and debug.
So what’s your top preferences?
IBM i Rational Team Blog 
Great idea for a post, Don. Here are some of my top preferences, customized for use with WebFacing:
1. Turn off the constant popping to the front of the Server and Console views (Server > uncheck ‘Show Servers view when server state changes’, and Run/Debug > Console > uncheck ‘Show when program writes to standard out’)
2. Create new perspectives with only the views I want:
* one for DDS editing, with just these views: Outline, Remote Systems, Web Settings. (Window > Save Perspective As)
* another for WebFacing Web work, with these views: WebFacing Projects, Navigator, Servers, Console, Properties, & Problems.
3. Font changes
* I usually reduce the size of the console font so that I can see more of it without scrolling (General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > Debug > Console font), and often also change it to one with a variable-width, since I don’t really need things to be aligned there.
* Not really being a big fan of Courier, I usually change the default editor font (General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > Basic > Text Font). I really like the Bitstream Vera fonts package(http://www.gnome.org/fonts/), and use the monospace member of that family.
Top preference? Lpex Editor -> Disable parsing. There are times I want to jockey a bunch of text without Lpex trying to syntax check for me.
An example is copying a block of RPG D-specs down into C-specs so I can move database fields into the data structure fields. I’ll do a block copy and then use the key record/playback to create EVALs out of them. Once they’re all turned into ds_name = db_name; I turn parsing back on.
Hania,
I always forget about that console view preference and it’s such a great one! I’ve heard many a customer complain about the console view always popping up to the front (some even put it in it’s own view area and minimize the view area as a workaround).
Buck,
I could see a shortcut key for disabling the parser being very handy here ;) It must be a pain to have to go to the preferences for that.
– Don
I like Show Heap Status in General, and all the options in Command Execution under Remote Systems -> iSeries. I set up a jobd, msgq, and job name just for wdsc compiles.
Phil, that Heap Status trick is cool. I just needed it today to help solve a memory leak.
My number one preference is resequence members on Save (under Remote Systems -> Remote Systems LPEX Editors). Number two is to remove auto-closure of control blocks (relocated once again, this time to Remote Systems -> Remote Systems LPEX Editor -> iSeries Parsers -> ILE RPG). Auto-closure is one of those features that is totally cool until you actually use it in production.
Joe
Is there a preference that suppresses the addition of the ‘iSeries Commands Log’ view at each compile?
Ron, not yet, but that has come up before and is on our list of requirements.
Don