Macro Bar

Disclaimer

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

Unlike the other projects this one is a plug-in, design to run under and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) such as Intellij or Eclipse. The difficult part is learning how to integrate the program into the IDE. The program itself is quite simple.

The Problem

IntelliJ supports keystroke macros. To trigger them you must hit a keystroke then type the macro name the hit enter. This is quite a production. For short macros, you might as well have keyed the macro expansion. What I want to do is trigger a macro with a single click. I want a bar of tiny icons, each one assigned to a keystroke macro. I just click the corresponding icon to trigger it.

The Implementation

The simplest way to implement this is with an XML (extensible Markup Language) configuration file. It contains such facts as:

• The size in pixels of the icons. Icons too small will be centred. Icons too big will be shrunk to fit.
• The name of each icon image.
• Where to find the icons, e.g. in a directory, in a jar, as a resource…
• The name of each keystroke macro corresponding to the image.
• Background colour of the bar, possibly transparent.
• The geometry, e.g. locations of centers of each image, or where line-breaks are in rows of cells.
• Keystroke/menu item to invoke the bar.
• Keystroke/menu item to hide the bar.
• Language. You may have a different constellation of icons for editing different languages, Java, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), bat etc.
• Where the bar goes, how it docks.

Here is first cut at what the XML configuration file might look like:

Here is a first cut at an XSD (XML Scheme Definition) grammar defininition for the XML file:

How it Works

On initial load, (or earlier) something parses the XML file and converts it into convenient internal form.

When the program starts, it composes a single giant bar-strip Image, painting all the individual icons onto it. It can then repaint very quickly by doing a clipped drawImage of that giant Image onto the drawing context.

When a mouse click occurs, it does some division to figure out which cell was clicked. Then it invokes the corresponding keystroke macro.

Getting Fancy

For bonus points, allow the user to dynamically configure the macro bar, adding new macros, deleting or rearranging and then save the configuration as an XML file.

You might provide a set of icons, so the user can get started without art work. You could provide a library of icons with various letters upper and lower case, punctuation, squares of various colours, arrows of various colours in various directions, triangles, circles, pentagons, collected in a tree to keep them organised. You might look at the code for Masker to see how you might automate their creation.

You could implement this project for any IDE that supports keystroke macros. If you did it for SlickEdit, you could generate Slick-C code for menu bars. You would not have do any mouse click fielding.

Offer

I will write the code for this as if it were a standalone application. You write the parts that integrate it into IntelliJ. I will wire you via PayPal on successful completion. All the work becomes open source.

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