Release Notes 6.0.1 documentation

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# GPS 6.0.1 Release Notes

Release date: January 13, 2014

## Changes to the user interface

This release of GPS is based on a major new release of the gtk+ toolkit. We took the opportunity to make various enhancements to the user interface itself.

### Local toolbars

A number of views now have a local toolbar. They also display their configuration settings in a local menu rather than in the Preferences dialog or the contextual menu.

Local toolbar in the Locations window

### Omni-search field in the toolbar

A search field is now provided, which will look simultaneously in various context (source file names, entities,...). You can optionally restrict the search to specific contexts to view all possible matches in this context.

This field replaces the two dialogs File‣Open File From Project and Navigate‣Goto Entity.... The menus are still available, but the actual search is done via the global search field.

The Tools‣Views‣Entity view was also removed since its features are now available through the global search field.

Various modes are available, to search full text, regular expressions or fuzzy matches. In particular, when searching in source code, GPS is able to do approximate search. For instance, searching for “saerch” will also match “search” when this mode is activated.

Search in all contexts

### Color schemes

A new preference is available to select color schemes. This effects other preferences and can be used to set dark colors for the background of editors and windows.

Setting the color scheme preference

Switching GPS to a dark theme

### Search window improvements

The search dialog provides a Scope to search only in the source files of the current project. The dialog was improved to show exactly which project is considered as current. Also, Navigate‣Search from an editor will set the current project to be that of the editor.

GPS can now limit Find and replace operations to the currently selected text. This is done by selecting the scope Current Selection in the Search dialog; this scope is automatically selected when launching the dialog while a selection exists in the current editor.

### Key shortcuts dialog improvements

The display of the key shortcuts in this dialog now matches what is done for the toplevel menus, using symbols like up arrow for the shift key, a caret sign for the control key, and the special symbols for Mac keyboards.

Key shortcuts display machine-specific symbols for keys

### Multiple Document Interface

#### Tab menu allows easy selection of open tabs

The right-click menu on notebook tabs now shows the list of all windows open in that tabs, to ease navigation.

Menu when right-clicking on tabs

#### Status bar removed

The status bar has been removed. It was only used to display the current tasks in progress, and the corresponding progress bars were moved to the right of the toolbar, replacing the throbber.

#### Use ellipsis in window titles

The text in the title bars and in the notebook tabs will now use ellipsis (”...”) when the window is too small to accomodate the whole text. The size of notebook tabs is also limited so that we do not end up with a single tab using most of the notebook widths, thus hidding the others. This behavior is controlled by a new preference Window‣Homogeneous Tabs.

Ellipsis in window titles

#### Limitations in the organization of windows

GPS now adds a restriction as to where editors and views can be put. For instance, editors can only be part of the perspective-independent part of the desktop, so that they always remain visible when switching perspectives. These limitations should prevent some surprising behaviors that could happen before due to the flexibility of the MDI.

#### Close tabs with middle-click

This is close to the behavior most web browsers implement and is a convenient way to quickly close a number of tabs.

#### Vertical tabs

It is now possible, via the contextual menu on each notebook tab, to change the orientation of the text. For instance, displaying the tabs on the left will by default rotate the text bottom-to-top, thus saving horizontal space.

#### Preserve location in new views

When creating a new view for an editor (for instance through drag-and-drop) the new view is now displayed at the same location as the original editor, rather than on the first line.

### Main window title bar shows base name first

Speaking of title bars, the GPS window’s title has been changed slightly, so that the base name of the current file appears first, then its directory, and finally the project. This is more user friendly on Windows where the title of the window is displayed in the task bar. It is now easier to chose between multiple running GPS.

### Clickable qualified name in editor status bars

The name of the current subprogram, as displayed in the editors status bars, now includes the name of the enclosing subprograms and packages. Each of these names is clickable to easily jump to the beginning of the enclosing block.

Clickable qualified names in editor status bar

### Outline view improvements

#### Protected objects in outline view

Protected and task types/objects and their entries are now visible in Outline view. A new filter in Show tasks, entries, and protected types is used to show/hide these items (in the local configuration menu).

New configuration menu for the outline view

#### Group spec and body in outline view

It is now possible to group the spec and body (or spec and full view) for an entity on the same row in the Outline view, to reduce the total height of the Outline view. Clicking on the name of the entity will jump to its spec, but if this is already the current location in the editor will jump to its body instead. It is also possible to click on either of the two icons to jump directory to the spec or the body.

Grouping spec and body on the same line in Outline

#### Filter in outline view

A filter has been added to the Outline view to make it easier to find entities.

#### Flat view mode in outline

It is now possible to display all entities at the same level, rather than nested hierarchically. In some cases, it makes searching for an entity easier. It also reduces the amount of horizontal space that the Outline view needs.

### Scenario view displays a tree

The Scenario view has been updated to a more usable tree rendering.

Scenario variables are editable in-place

### Messages window

It is now possible to configure whether the Messages window should wrap lines, or require horizontal scrolling.

When a build terminates on failure, GPS now displays the total progress (as displayed by the task manager) in the console. This makes it easier to know how many files were compiled up to the first compilation error.

There are various backdoors in GPS that makes it possible to close the Messages window. GPS will now automatically reopen it as needed.

### Locations view

In the Locations view, actions such as clear locations, or the filter panel were moved into a local toolbar to make them more accessible. The preference Auto Jump To First Location was removed from the preferences menu and moved to the toolbar as well.

The filter was also moved into that local toolbar, and will now also match the location of messages, not just their text.

A new setting was added to force the alphabetical sorting of file names.

By default, the contents of the Locations view is no longer saved when GPS exits (and restored when it restarts), because it sometimes resulted in very long loading times. The saving can be reactivated by using the local configuration menu.

### Tooltips

#### Tooltips while scrolling

When manipulating an editor scrollbar with the mouse, a tooltip is displayed that shows the current line and entity.

#### Tooltips in Project, Files and Windows views

Tooltips added to views to help navigation when windows are narrow. They also provide additional information in some cases.

Tooltips in the Project view

#### Tooltips in the editor

Ada 2012 and SPARK 2014 aspects are now displayed in tooltips.

### Support for high-density displays

GPS now supports high-density displays. In particular, the display of tooltips, editor line numbers, or the various browsers (call graph, entity, debugger,...) now looks much sharper.

On the other end of the spectrum, GPS now supports displays with a color depth of 16 bits per pixels, which are often used for remote displays.

## Cross-references

### New cross-reference engine

GPS and GNATbench both have a new xref engine, based on sqlite. This new engine is expected to bring extra performance (since the xref database becomes persistent across sessions and GPS will no longer need to parse ALI files on the fly), as well as more stability (by using an external process to fill the database, and relying on sqlite’s very good stability).

### Find all references

When you perform a “Find All References”, each reference will also display the context of that reference (in general, the subprogram within which the reference is found).

## Enhancements to editors

### Aliases expansion directly in editors

The aliases expansion feature now works directly in-editor, without presenting the user a dialog for aliases with parameters. The user progresses through the fields directly in the editor via the `Ctrl+Tab` shortcut. Visual feedback is provided for the current field via highlighting.

### Status bars

When a selection exists in an editor, the status bar will display the number of characters and lines that are selected.

The order of buttons and text in the status bar was modified to avoid flickering when the location is changed or a selection is made.

### Syntax highlighting

Ada 2012 and SPARK 2014 aspects are highlighted with a different color configurable via the preferences, so that these are easily found when editing source files.

GPS now supports highlighting of numeric values in the code editor and provides a new user preference to customize it.

### Smart-completion

#### Smart-completion on aliases

Aliases can now be completed and expanded by the regular smart-completion mechanism.

Smart completion for aliases

#### Visual indication of visibility

In the smart completion popup, entities that are not visible in the current scope are now displayed in grey.

### Completion for return blocks

Add “return ... end return;” statement support for complete block completion

### Indentation

#### Improved indentation of conditional expressions

Ada 2012 If-expressions and case-expressions are better handled by the indentation engine and in particular extra indentation levels are used for each case branch.

#### Improved indentation of parenthesized expressions

Extra spaces following an open parenthesis is now taken into account when indenting Ada code.

### Refill automatically computes paragraphs

The menu Edit‣Selection‣Refill will now either apply to the current selection if it exists (as before), or automatically compute the extents of the current paragraph to reformat (instead of only applying to the current line).

Refill computes the bounds of the paragraph

When refilling a comment block with the Refill command, the cursor will now be placed at the end of the last word of the comment, so as to enable the user to keep editing his comment seamlessly.

### Preserve location in new views

When creating a new view for an editor (for instance through drag-and-drop) the new view is now displayed at the same location as the original editor, rather than on the first line.

### Transluscent highlighting colors

It is now possible to specify translucent colors for error messages, current lines,... in the editors. This is a convenient solution so that the current line also shows whether it has an associated error.

### Safer saving of files

Saving files is now done via a temporary file which is later renamed. This is safer, and protects against temporary disk issues that would happen just during the actual saving, and could result in losing work.

## Plug-ins and python enhancements

### Plug-ins dialog

The plug-ins dialog has been simplified. It no longer shows the python files that are mandatory for GPS. It no longer supports custom initialization commands for the modules (since standard python can be used for this). The implementation of the plug-ins is now accessible via an hyper link, instead of being displayed in this dialog.

### Spark

The SPARK 2014 toolset is now supported from both GPS and GNATbench. A Prove menu will be available if the SPARK 2014 toolset is installed and found on the PATH at start up.

### CodePeer

#### Progress bar when running gps_codepeer_bridge

After running codepeer, gps_codepeer_bridge is launched to load messages, which can take a long time on large sources. A progress bar is now displayed during this phase to give feedback to the user.

#### Separate file for audit data

CodePeer’s audit data for messages are stored in separate file, to improve performance of loading it on subsequence GPS run.

#### Simplified CodePeer report window

The CodePeer report window has been simplified to improve usability and remove unneeded information. Access to the various filters is also improved.

#### New review classification of CodePeer messages

When doing a manual review of a CodePeer message, the user can no longer change the message ranking, but instead specify a review classification and the name of the reviewer. New message review dialog is added and new filter was added for CodePeer Report view to manage visibility of messages by review status.

#### Generate CSV report

As part of the CodePeer integration, a new menu CodePeer‣Generate CSV Report is provided to generate a CSV report file directly from GPS.

### New `formatfile.py`

This optional plug-in adds a new menu Edit‣Format Whole File which reformats the whole file using GPS internal formatting, while preserving the current cursor location.

This is a simple plug-in that can be used as an example on how to create new menus and preserve the current location.

### New `modules.py`

A new support python script named `modules.py` has been added to GPS. It provides a high-level interface to extending GPS. In particular, it makes it possible to create new views that are saved in the desktop and restored when GPS is restarted.

### Align end of line comments in `align.py`

The `align.py` plugin now provides a solution to align end of line comments.

By default, if multiple lines are selected and you press `<tab>`, GPS will also align the colons (:), use clauses (use), arrows (=>) and assignments (:=) in these lines. This behavior can be deactivated by a new preference in the Editors section.

### Speed up in `highlighter.py`

This python module is used as the basis for all python scripts that need to highlight (part of) editors. In particular, you can easily extend it to highlight specific text or regular expressions in your buffer. This script now provides an OverlayStyle class, which supports more properties than before (in particular, you can strike through or underline specific text in your editors with just a few lines of code).

This improves two user-visible plugins, `dispatching.py` and `auto_highlight_occurrences.py`.

### Removed: `execute_extended.py`

This plugin allows one to easily execute any of the GPS commands via the keyboard. This behavior is now directly available via the new global search box in the GPS toolbar.

### GPS.EditorOverlay can highlight a whole line

The EditorOverlay class can now be used in Python plugins to highlight an entire line, through the property “paragraph-background”:

    # Create an overlay for an editor:
    b = GPS.EditorBuffer.get(GPS.File ("my_file.adb"))
    o = b.create_overlay("my_overlay_name")

    # Set the paragraph-background property to pink
    o.set_property ("paragraph-background", "#f0c0c0")

    # This highlights the entire line 317 in my file
    b.apply_overlay (o,
       GPS.EditorLocation(b, 317, 1),
       GPS.EditorLocation(b, 317, 1))

### GPS.MDI.add to put on top of consoles

The python function GPS.MDI.add now has additional parameters to specify the initial location of the new widget. This allows you to put widgets on top of the existing GPS consoles for instance.

## Other enhancements worth noting

### Project wizard uses gnatname

The project wizard now optionally uses gnatname to search for Ada units in files with non-standard naming conventions.

### Codefix improvements

Autofix has always done fixes in lowercases. This enhancement performs the fixes on missing constants following the user defined preferences specified in the preference Editor‣Ada/Reserved word casing.

### Preferences

The Apply button was removed from the preferences dialog. Instead, GPS will be refreshed every time any of the settings is modified.

GPS will now only save those preferences that have been modified into its `HOME/.gps/preferences.xml` file. This change should be mostly invisible to users, except when changing versions of GPS where the new default will be picked up automatically.

A new preference has been added to control the color of the current line in the debugger. This is in particular useful when combined with dark themes.

A new preference Documentation‣Leading Comments was added to control the order in which GPS looks at the comments (before or after the declaration) to retrieve the documentation for an entity. This impacts the tooltips displayed while in the editor, as well as the generation of documentation via the Tools‣Documentation menu.

Another preference was added to set the toolbar style to “text only”.

A new preference was added in the Windows page to override the background of tooltips as set by the gtk+ theme.

### Debugger

The contents of the dialog to connect to a board (target name and protocol) is now restored every time the dialog is displayed, avoiding the need to enter the same information every time.

### Command line

This new switch is similar to -X in gprbuid, and can be used to set the value of the scenario variables found in your project.

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