Hello,

I'ved created an RSS aggregation site for Object Pascal related blogs: http://planet.objpas.org/

This is a test run, and the look and feel will be changed in the feature. If you have a blog or can provide RSS for FPC/Lazarus news please send me an email with the feed details and I'll add you.

Ido

I tried something like this before and I was suprised at the dearth of Lazarus and FreePascal bloggers. Getting Lazarus and FPC developers, (let alone users) to blog about their experiences is like pulling teeth.I think a law should be passed requiring FPC users to blog about their usage and experiences at least twice a year.

I just visited and it was the same South American bloggers like Silvio Clecio, Leonardo Rame. You do get a number of Delphi developers though.
I am hoping my attempt was premature. The Lazarus forum should have a bold banner saying reading "What FPC or Lazarus feature have you blogged about this year?" Making it this month or this quarter may just be too much.

You have also my blog (mostly in Hebrew, to keep Pascal in the conversation, and provide local information).
Yes, with FPC/Lazarus most does not keep blogs, I created some interviews once with FPC developers, and Florian
asked me "what do you prefer, someone who develop the compiler or someone who talk" :)

Maybe not everyone is so enthousiast about blogs as you ?

I agree with Florian; I prefer to work on FPC.

Michael.

While I can certainly understand your point of view, the more people that are talking about FPC and Lazarus, the more people that will become exposed to it.

g.

True. But I think Florian (or my) time is better spent on actaul coding. Let people that like blogs do the blogging.

They're almost certainly going to be .

Isn't the svn rss feed not the best opportunity to talk about fpc/lazarus :)?

When I hear stuff like "sure pascal is cool but lack of good string support", I think that it is more self explanatory then anything.

At the local open source community I'm a known evangelist for Object Pascal, and my blog is full of code, text etc, regarding stuff in object pascal.
Some of the people over here that actually started using FPC/Lazarus arrived due to my blog posts, so spreading the word is very important imho.

Ido

It is. But some might code, others might evangelize. What I wanted to say: those who are interested what happens in FPC in detail might follow also the svn rss feed. There is simply no need for the developers to blog about this.

I disagree on this, but that's ok

_______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal

As soon as you start working seriously on the compiler, I'll start to blog ;)

that are talking about FPC and Lazarus, the more people that will become exposed to it.

:)

Regards,
Sven

You mean like the things that I write for a living that actually being used country wide by big companies ?

Pascal is only one programming language I use, and only for hobby, not for make a living, and that's partly because of you.
You prefer to create new features, but keep it to yourself, and hoping that someone will catch-up.
It does not work like this, specially with Pascal.

But what do I know, I don't write software ...

ik wrote

Pascal is only one programming language I use, and only for hobby, not for make a living,

The same applies here.

and that's partly because of you.

Well and partly you :) I'am pretty sure that some of the developers would blog about their work if somebody pays them for blogging. But you don't do so (obviously I understand this), they have to earn their living by other means.

You prefer to create new features, but keep it to yourself, and hoping that someone will catch-up.

You miss the point. My time for fpc is limited and fixed. If I write blog entries instead of coding, fpc will evolve slower. If I spent 25% of all of my fpc time on blogging instead of improving fpc, maybe pascal would be dead now because no advanced OSS compiler is available and it would be only my private pet compiler I use to compile my chess programs and the controll software for our model railway.

It does not work like this, specially with Pascal.

How do you know so? Developers quickly realize if a tool is no evolving and all advertisement is only buzz and will quickly use other tools.

Once I'm done with university and have reimplemented my blog software with silvioprog's brook framework I hope to blog more. :)

Regards,
Sven

And sometimes, having a high-profile blogger pushing one particular product can be counterproductive since he ends up a figure of fun.

Would the said high-profile blogger be Zarko of delphi.about.com, who is referenced here -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/11/verity_stob_sons_of_kahn/. Fear not, Zarko has ceased blogging on delphi.about.com since January 13 to he could be enticed to blog for
Lazarus and FPC

To be fair to Michael and Florian, the compiler i.e. FPC is not the same as the IDE Lazarus, which is the hub for most of the activity, so one can understand their outlook, but a bit of info from the leading lights of FPC every now and then would be appreciated :)

My beef is mostly with Lazarus developers. They are more at fault here as a lot of the new features which make a good difference to productivity tend go unannounced or unnoticed.

It might not be related to Lazarus, but because of this I've started to write feature announcements for new and big changes (generic constraints, TThread extension, type helpers) so that users can see what new features were added to the compiler/the class libraries so that they can test them (and hopefully report bugs they find). Also I'm trying to give potential future developments so that they can see in what ways a feature could be improved.

Regards,
Sven

I'm reluctant to mention names, since I don't see why I should nurture the hapless. However I was actually thinking about somebody who's presented a brave and optimistic face on Borland's behalf for several decades, as well as a few others I've known on a private conferencing service representing Borpricocadero, IBM and Sun.

I'm a freelancer for the past 6 years, so please pay me on all of the amount
of time I spent talking, lecturing and evangelist FPC and Lazarus on my own expense.

You never see me ask for it, because I do it because I want to see Pascal in the industry.
I do it because I have need to see it used, to make programming fun again, or for any
other reason.

When I know why Florian (and others) started FPC/K, why do they implement feature X, and not feature Y, when I understand the story of the core developers,
It's easier to relate to things.

I can talk about a feature that you or anyone else added or removed, but I can't
bring the whole story of it.

Why is it that FPC/K now exists for 20 years as an open source project, and you
can't earn money for developing it, while Linus that have an OS that exists for 21
years can ?

This type of things are important more then you think.

But not only this, take a look at the freepascal.org web site: animated gif (from the 90's),
the whole way of thinking there is not designer oriented - It does not invite new people
to the project, does not provide a proper place to be etc...

It's not easy to find documentation for things, some are at the wiki, some at the /doc-html/ path
and many does not exists.

So you are working on all this cool features and is the fastest compiler in the world, and you can
do everything you wanted with pascal and many things you don't (and it's not a c++ like
technology garbage can). But no new blood see it, use it or can be attracted to it, so what's
the point ? unless it's pure hobby and all of this does not matter ...

Developers, doctors, and all the people who have a profession does not choose a tool that
they know nothing about, and if they have too much choice, they usually choose the one that
everyone(tm) choose, not because it is good for them, but because everyone is using it.

It was proven so many times over and over again, you can find on the web people such as
Dan Ariely have a lot of talks and books about it, if you have time for such things ...

Actually, I'am not interested in earning money with it.

For what? For the fun? FPC is probably by far the most successful non company supported oss compiler so I'am sure I know what is important.

But not only this, take a look at the freepascal.org <http://freepascal.org> web site: animated gif (from the 90's),

Ever , kernel.org, llvm.org etc.?

the whole way of thinking there is not designer oriented - It does not invite new people to the project, does not provide a proper place to be etc...

Why should I care? They might use the tools they like, I use the tools I like.

It's not easy to find documentation for things, some are at the wiki,

A compiler is not a toy, and I know that serious programmers find the needed docs.

FPC is still growing so what is your point?

Yes to solve everything but keep it for yourself :P

Nice, Pascal is at the same level of usage and exposure as gcc, Linux kernel and llvm,
nothing more to do, 0xPascal maybe, just to show that 201x can have something new ?

Sure that compile is a toy, it can't do much, just parse something and move it to be something else :P

And documentation should be at one place, including new features, workarounds etc... for old versions.
Look at:

http://ruby-doc.org/
http://www.python.org/doc/
http://perldoc.perl.org/
http://golang.org/doc/
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/
http://docs.embarcadero.com/products/rad_studio/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/JavaScript
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/
https://developers.google.com/

Should I continue, or do you get my point ?

If a tree fall in the forest and no one hear about it, did it made a sound ?

My point is that features are good, but when on one knows about it, then what's the point of it all ?

_______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal

I will repeat myself. I have said this on the lists many times:

We count on YOU, the users to spread the news.

Form a community. Do whatever it takes.

We are not the kind of people that are suitable to do this:

Personally, I never read blogs. They are a waste of my time; 99% are pure drivel. Everybody has opinions, few actually have something interesting to say. Knowing that I have such attitude, do you think I am suitable to write a blog ?

I hope not :-)

What I (and Florian) are trying to say is that our limited time is better spent on coding than on spreading the news of FPC. But no-one is stopping you from spreading the news, on the contrary. We'll be glad that you do, because it means you think FPC is worth the effort.

Trying to convince us to spread the news, however, is wasted effort.

Michael.

Wrong: FPC is OSS so I don't keep it for myself, if people cannot read svn rss feeds or release announcement, well, I cannot help.

Nice, Pascal is at the same level of usage and exposure as gcc, Linux kernel and llvm,

And you think some fancy webpage filled with java script (which is turned off in my browser) would change this?

Well, then it's also fine not to waste time with docs. People like to discover new stuff in their toys.

And documentation should be at one place, including new features, workarounds etc... for old versions.

Possible, and who should do this work?

Yes, I got it: you compare fpc docs written by a few people in their spare leisure time with docs written and maintaned mainly by multi billion companies existing for decades.

So what do you miss in the 2.6.0 news post? What do you miss in the android news post?

post them in a blog and it /is/ blogging ;)

On Sun, February 17, 2013 18:10, ik wrote:
.
.

Yes to solve everything but keep it for yourself :P

You (and many others) can use it (and do so as seen from download statistics, bug reports, etc.), right?

.
.

Should I continue, or do you get my point ?

.
.

Better not with this discussion, if you ask me. ;-) I believe that both of you expressed your points and everybody interested had the opportunity to understand both views. Both views are valid and everybody should do what he can do best (and what brings fun to him if he does it as a hobby).

If even commercial company like Embarcadero uses FPC for compilation for some targets, doesn't it prove that there are some people knowing about it? Some other proofs mentioned above too. Still, certain PR is indeed useful, feel free to continue providing it. :-)

Tomas

i know exactly this feeling... it is like doing custom programing... i can/will do that and those contracting it will pay me for that development... i won't write it and then try to make money selling it so they can get it for less cost... they can recoup their costs for development by reselling it themselves...

pretty much the same... i'm not a marketer or a salesman... i will sell you something i have if you come to me looking for it but i won't cold call you or shove it in your face trying to get you to buy it...

To Id in particular and others like minds I think there is something which isn't quite understood here. The compiler and the language ie FPC is quite a separate thing from the development tools and libraries, toolchains and the areas where it is applied. For instance if you read fpc-devel you will see that it is targetted at a wide range of CPUs and embedded devices, and that is not an area where the latest language developments are of much interest. Rightly or wrongly the compiler developers have become the focus where all matters FPC related are centred and this shouldn't be the case.

I had my issues with this a long time ago and I even blogged about it
- https://devblog.brahmancreations.com/content/observations-on-freepascal-and-lazarus-development, and it also resulted in
https://devblog.brahmancreations.com/content/build-scripts-for-installing-freepascal-and-lazarus-from-source (which has resulted in almost 60.000 hits to date, LOL) but I have come to understand why things are the way they are.

Some of your comparisons with other language projects are not quite fair. You mentioned Ruby, Python, Java but this comparison is not appropriate. Leaving aside the quality of documentation, something must be noted here. The languages you mentioned are more or less owned by a few individuals/corporations/committees who determine EXACTLY how the language is defined, the primary libraries and how they are implemented. There is only one Matz, one Guido, and one Oracle. FreePascal aims to support and retain compatibility with many different dialects which sprung up over the years and that isn't easy. Graeme's complaints about what he considers an unwarranted desire to maintain compatibility with Delphi are legion, yet (ex) Delphi developers are the ones who can do the most to help FreePascal evolve if they don't buy into promises by Embarcadero to have Delphi working fine and dandy on Linux, which really means the Mac, as there is one too many variants of Linux consumer-wise.

The main hindrance in the FPC world over the years, I believe, has been the reluctance to allow a modicum of documentation comments in the source code that would allow documentation to be built directly from the IDE with some CodeTools, ie in Lazarus. I think that is where it has been hurt most because it is not a corporate funded language and hobbyists have enough problems going through an edit-compile-run cycle to finish their projects, let alone document them in a separate files using plain text editors. There is more flexibility now and I think the upcoming Lazarus versions will make it easier.

One more thing lest I forget. The official FPC documentation is very good, especially for documents created by volunteers and hobbyists. That it is not accompanied by examples and demos is quite another matter. The solution to that is would be some kind of Pascal interpreter with a REPL that would enable FreePascal developers to have their Web 2.0 cake and eat it, so they could develop their IDEs and some web-based documentation CMSs speedily, but most of the efforts in that area, like ElevateSoft Web Buillder, Raudus, SmartMobileStudio etc are closed source.

What the Open Source Pascal world needs most now is a good interpreter to start developing their IDE and documentation in, which is compiled to machine code after, not because Lazarus is not good enough, but turnaround times need to be fast for a hobbyist and volunteer driven project.

Frank Church wrote

One more thing lest I forget. The official FPC documentation is very good, especially for documents created by volunteers and hobbyists. That it is not accompanied by examples

c:\fpc\docs>dir ex*.pp /s | grep -c ex
668

What do I miss?

FPC implement things. It does not implement all of Pascal ISO, and it add a lot of things on it's own

Yet, Google was able to create Dalvik
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_%28software%29) by using Sun/Oracle API, there are numerous implementation of Ruby (http://jruby.org/, http://rubini.us/ for example) and Python (http://www.jython.org/, http://pypy.org/), a lot more people to contribute to it,
because it can offer things.

FreePascal aims to support and retain compatibility with many different dialects which sprung up over the years and that isn't easy.

FPC is mostly attempting to be compatible with Delphi this days afaik.

I don't need an IDE to develop Pascal, unlike Java for example, I can use VIM (and actually sometimes do), to develop. A language that must be with IDE sucks big time.
I love Lazarus, but there are other IDE's out there as well, including text editors
such as sublime and notepad+ etc...

I need documentation and understanding of what is implemented, why, differences between versions, what to expect from one version to another with my code etc...

It's not about the IDE/Editor, it's about the project, and FPC developers know better what is
in plan, what is the direction, why things works as they do etc...

I'm an expert in the IT industry. I have a lot of knowledge in information security, VoIP, databases
working with system tools (firewalls etc) and more. Building applications that can use such technologies,
i do not have knowledge in compilers. I have written several parsers in my life, but it's not the same.

Don't expect me to understand something that is not part of what I do because then I need to enter to
an new set of field and learn it.

I'm working on making msgpack in native Pascal. I needed to understand better how strings works in FPC (that are different then Delphi btw), and I could not find
good documentation on each individual string type, I could not find a lot of needed
information about the path the string is going to have in FPC. Did you know that 2.7.1
have new way of working with locales of strings ?

When I create a library, I need to know such things to prepare my code, or understand
that it is something I will need to do, only recently there where few wiki entries about it.

With generics, can you give me good documentation of FPC about it ? The wiki has old information, some of it not relevant anymore.

There are bugs in the way it is implemented with 2.6.0, and fixes for it on 2.7.1, but the workarounds
of the bugs are not documented, I found them in the bug tracker by accident. I could not find any reference for such issues on the wiki, or the official documentation.

So no, the documentation is enough, you need more information, you need different way of creating it.
For example the Ruby and Python way of documentation works a bit different then the state of mind of FPC's.
They also explain the thinking behind it.

But you missed understand my whole claim here.
Pascal is an underdog, that many people are unwilling to hear about. I'm doing a lot of evangelism in that area. I moved from talks about "stop talking about Pascal, it is useless" to
talks such as "but FPC has static linking, and gcc has dynamic linking, and dynamic linking is the
answer to life universe and everything".
That's a whole new world you see ? Instead of not caring, now it's "we checked it a bit, but will not use", and that's
after almost 10 years of my own work on this.

Two months ago, I had a meeting at one of the biggest portals in my country for something they want me to build them.
The whole room of the place I had the meeting, either been in one of the lecture I gave, or seen something in open source that I've done.
Everyone knew who I was when I entered the room. It's not simple or easy to do such things, and when you do the right noise, people at the end will go with what you say, just to prove you wrong, and then when they can't they know something, and even might start using it themselves.

That's what I do for FPC and Lazarus for the past 10 years +-, besides some contributions.

-- Frank Church

Ido

I am referring to the HTML docs at -
http://www.freepascal.org/docs.var. it's not the type that users can leave comments and examples in, like PHP for instance.

I am not complaining about the official docs, I actually praised them, but users come to Lazarus and FPC with expectations based on what they see in other projects and that is the cause of the complaints.

_______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal

Whaaat? I don't like java, but don't you know you can use javac command line?, and program in any text editor?.

Leonardo M. Ramé
http://leonardorame.blogspot.com

and the complains are justified. fpc as a project lack of people to do things. for ruby the Rails project brought a lot of people to develop with the language. at python it was django. what is the project that will make people to try and use pascal ?
how can you find "new blood" to bring to the projects ? how can you make sure that people are interested ?

Try to develop an application/library with Java using using an editor such as vim, and you will want to kill yourself.
too many files (each class has it's own file), the path where you place the files is part of the namespace.
ant is not very simple to use, and if you use tools such as spring in get harder.
it's not simple to detect without reading documentation what are the exception that are thrown back, and almost every error with java is an exception.

you can't really use java without an ide for normal projects, only for simple ones, and I speak from experience.

Google and Sun are multibillion dollar corporations. Their owners visit the local convenience store in their private jets. They could fund the development of a debugger, an interpreter and a brand new IDE for FPC/Lazarus out of their pocket change, so that comparison is inapplicable here. They also expect a return of billions from their investments.

MOST IMPORTANT (yes ALL CAPS) they have shifted the focus of most development away from the desktop to the web, and that is why languages and tools like Pascal and Delphi suffer because they have diverted a great deal of talent and effort, only for the users to wind up on rocky shores. Delphi, NET and C# users allfeel betrayed. Do you see what happened to Borland after they focused their effort on JBuilder? And still those languages do not fulfill their promise. Can Eclipse, or any Ruby or Python tool develop GUI rich applications as well as Lazarus? I don't think so, or else I wouldn't be using it.

After all the corporate funding and support Eclipse still has problems that they now seek contributions from end users.

Google has developed Go and are developing Dart for the web, so they can develop desktop like apps to rent to subscribers. I would say they should develop Dart as a general purpose language with support for the web and it would gain more traction, only that goes against their business model.

So FreePascal is not that leading developers did not develop FPC with the intention to be millionaires, although I'd wager that given their skills and experience they make a pretty comfortable living from it.

The killer app that would revive Pascal's fortunes hasn't been developed yet. The best thing that can happen to it is a much improved development experience, and sorry to say that is not really a compiler issue or a dialect issue. Perhaps some one should inform the GNOME developers that Lazarus and FreePascal should be their developer tool of choice. With a Pascal to Javascript translator, they could have everything they need for success.

they are not /in/ the documentation to be read with the docs... think about it like a programming book you by at the store... you are reading a chapter about pointers and there's a simple working demo included in the chapter that is expanded on the further you read in the chapter...

that the sources for the demos are on the disk is a GoodThing<tm> because that saves the reader from having to type them in... however, that they are on the disk and not in the documentation also means that the reader cannot look at and contemplate them while reading the (printed) documentation while in the ""library"" with their C0FFEE while taking their morning/daily "constitutional"... or at the breakfast table or on the bus or train or even just while reading in bed...

In my opinion it would be ok to make the webpage a little bit more eyecandy. That can be done also without java script(!)

http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Das_Auge_isst_mit
(only in german)

It would be also ok to have the possibility to donate the fpc project. But some time ago you refused this because you feel too much pressure (responsible) then.

eyecandy isn't worth any more than regular candy... candy is candy which is only a sweet to attract those who can't/won't stomach the reality of the basics...

a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down...

That can be done also without java script(!)

agreed... but too many are wrapped up in making candy to suck on rather than a real meal that actually satisfies the hunger...

Sorry but that is bullshit. I'm a freelancer, works alone, with minimal budget, yet I find the time to write specifications for my clients, documentation, emails, explaining things, checking stuff, doing booking, and even cleaning my work space.

You give excuse to keep the existing problem, but actually there are so many open source projects of one or two people developing that prove that it can be, it's all up to you.

They are...

https://plus.google.com/u/0/112026213399155142823/posts/ERWneYjmyMD

Just for you :)

My last post in this whole subject. You know my opinion, it looks like too many people outside the projects feels the same, but not inside of it, enjoy.

Could we all please calm down again especially *before* someone decides to leave the community?

I think or hope that we can all agree that there are different kinds of people:
- those that like to blog about (in this case) their work on/with Pascal (like Ido)
- those that would like to blog, but currently lack the time (like me)
- those that do not want to blog (like Florian)

I think this rather normal, because we are all human and every human is different and no flamewar will change who we are.

So in my opinion it would be the best if we now leave Michael wrote we encourage the community members to spread the news about Free Pascal.

Ido, I don't know wether your freelancing is your main job (from what I've read I'd say it is), but you should not forget that for us core developers FPC is not. We are working on it in our free time besides having a full time job that might be completely unrelated to programming in Pascal or some of us are still going to the university (like me). So the time spent on FPC is already limited which is why we don't normally spend much time on things like documentation, because we prefer to fix bugs or enhance the usability of FPC. But we thankfully have someone on our team that does work on documentation (Michael).

So to bring this mail to an end: if you have critics about the things we do, you are of course free to bring them up (free speech after all). But on the one hand this should not be done in the middle of a more or less heated discussion and on the other hand you should not expect that we'll completely agree with your critics, because either we don't want or we can't do things differently.

Thank you for reading.

Regards,
Sven

<snip remark about Lazarus>

Thanks, Sven, for writing these feature announcements. For me, they help in letting me know what's going on.

I agree with a lot of the remarks about documentation in this thread. I suspect that having some easy tool to edit fpdoc documentation and directly show the results would be useful.
After producing some documentation with it, I've given up on fpdoc as too unwieldy. I suspect many have or haven't even tried. Having a tool in place (e.g. a web frontend, or an improved LazDE) that allows easier editing of fpdoc documentation would help a lot. This may help get more info into fpdoc instead of the wiki, the forum, the mailing list...

Frank Church wrote

My beef is mostly with Lazarus developers. They are more at fault here as a lot of the new features which make a good difference to productivity tend go unannounced or unnoticed.

That's why I created the following wiki page... for exactly that reason. I spent lots of hours searching the repository history, matching features to dates and releases. I stopped doing it since just before the v1.0 release.

http://wiki.freepascal.org/New_IDE_features_since

The whole point of that wiki page was also to use animated gifs to visually show a feature - instead of reading a long and boring list of text.

Maybe such a wiki page could also be created for LCL. But this is all a discussion that belongs in the lazarus mailing list.

Regards,
- Graeme -

I'm glad you did create such a page. It's nice to read :) [and I did learn the nice feature here and then through that page as well :) ]

Regards,
Sven

Would he be bearded by any chance?

I did some experimental hacking a couple of weeks ago which resulted in a list of all RTL functions with which FPC versions they appeared in. However what this really demonstrated was that trying to do it after the event is unreliable, this sort of thing really needs to go back to the original (XML or whatever) which might place unanticipated demands on the software doing the job if the format gets tweaked between versions.

Sure. There has been a similar discussion not such a long time ago. If someone volunteers to design something more eyecandy (stressing the word "design", i.e. the point should not be in proposals for switching to some complicated tools requiring a lot of effort to keep the things working), we will certainly consider such a (visual) change.

This comment misses the point, I'm afraid. If you propose creating and managing a non-profit organization which collects the donations and hires some (additional) people for blogging, creating more examples, documenting packages not documented yet, etc. (mostly hiring people interested in doing such stuff and thus applying for such jobs), you're welcome to do so. If you propose that people who decided working on FPC as their hobby (in their leisure time) instead of creating a commercial company and trying to make money for living out of it should collect donations for doing something they don't like doing, it makes no sense.

Tomas

This is a very useful page. I didn't know that Lazarus was that well featured.

I noticed the Editor Toolbar feature (implemented in v0.9.24 (2007-11-05) ) and installed the package, but I can't see any menu option to configure it.
What steps to I follow?

i'll have to look again... i honestly haven't seen them listed in any of the documentation pages i've printed...

but perhaps we're also speaking of semantics? i will go back and look further... my apologies if i'm incorrect and the sources with explanations are actually in the pages i've not printed...

Yes, we didn't know that, that is the problem, there is no good map in that jungle.

Best Regards
Zaher Dirkey

Frank Church wrote

What steps to I follow?

Install the package and recompile the IDE - as with any IDE plugin. The empty editor toolbar should appear in the Editor Window. Only two buttons should exist. "Configure" - the left most button, as can be seen from the screenshot. And the "Jump To" dropdown button, which allows you to jump to various places in the source code.

Click the Configure button, open the "IDEMainWindow" tree node. Navigate to the features you want in the toolbar. Select it, and press the "right arrow button".

For some reason, not all available actions work via the editor toolbar, but most from the "IDEMainWindow" does. The editor toolbar configuration will be stored in a separate XML file in your Lazarus config directory - making it easy to share with others.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Here is another page, not as many pictures, but a good list of useful features: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_IDE_Tools

Martin wrote

Here is another page, not as many pictures, but a good list of useful features: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_IDE_Tools

​I meant we need recategory this articles under a good index/tree, so we can start from home index to discover the wiki.

Best Regards
Zaher Dirkey

At some time, I stumbled over this:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Alternative_Main_Page

I don't know if there are any plans, to merge that with the current main page. IMHO it provides a good overview, but it would need some of the text from the current main to be merged into.

Martin wrote

At some time, I stumbled over this: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Alternative_Main_Page

That would be a MUCH better main page. Clear topics that are easy to see and read. It would need some minor additions, but over all, much better than the default main page.

Regards,
- Graeme -

It does appear to have quite a lot going for it.