[Testfire] 30th April version

⚠️ Important information for this release

I’m putting this at the top so everybody downloading this release can see it. Due to a problem that I’ve created myself, the file prolog.xml is needed to run Logix, but I didn’t include it in the zip of this release, because I thought I did remove it from the code. If you don’t put it, you’ll have an unrecoverable System.io.FileNotFoundException.

To fix it, just download prolog.xml from the code section (under bin > Debug > prolog.xml). In future versions I’ll look more into this problem.

Hello there.

I know I've been without any update or release published in a long time. Why? Well, I had lots of school stuff to do, social stuff to do, and also I didn't have too much motivation in continuing. I didn't have a use in Logix anymore, nor I didn't want to continue it to be honest.

Recently though, I wanted to return to coding again, and to at least get an alpha version to a somewhat good milestone, so here it is, the first release after so much time (and I hope not the last!). So what's new?

Bug fixes

• in the latest release, if you had Text Properties open, it would open too at first boot when you have the Start Page selected. Now it works properly.
• (I'll reintroduce thread running in a later version, even if it's in the changelog of this version)
• when moving panels outside of the window, or to a position where you didn't have the whole panel visible, it would just be stuck there. Now it docks back to the inside of the window, so it's always visible.
• now when changing back to the Start Page, all the panels that shouldn't be there for the Start Page (find, go to, AutoCompile) are hidden on the Start Page tab, and then re-enabled on other tabs.
• the Search Engine bar in Settings is now wider
• now when opening the Theming page, it correctly loads the image of the current theme you've selected, rather than changing only when clicking on it
• now when enabling or disabling custom header/footer in Settings, the C/C++ syntax option gets enabled and disabled correctly.

Performance

I always wanted to improve performance of Logix, but I wasn't sure on how to do it, and neither do I now too much, but I've made a few key changes that improved performance a lot.

Before, every time you'd open Gramlex, it would create a new Gramlex form, every single time. Same thing for Settings: it would create a new Settings form, and then a new MDIParent1 form inside Settings, each and every time. Now, it just creates these forms the first time you run it, and all the other times it just references to what it already exists. This makes the app much faster than before, and consumes about less than 40/50MB of RAM, along with less CPU usage too. Whereas before it would have a maximum of 100MB and even more, now it maxes out at 70MB of RAM, and with more performance updates in the future, I hope to get this number even lower!

Gramlex is also now ran in a separate thread from the main thread, to have slightly better performance and take more advantage of multi-core processors. In the next versions, I'll try to move more other stuff to different threads.

New features

What update would it be without new features?

• AutoCompile toolbar: you have now a floating toolbar which can let you quickly access all the AutoCompile features available for now (header, footer, comments).
  

• Comments: comments are now finally complete! You can now change every single symbol for each different syntax. Comment syntax now changes based on the syntax you've chosen, and also you can choose to make the comment line end with a certain symbol, or none (you can write "nothing", "Nothing", or even nothing in the textbox, and it'll get it.
  

• Help: under Miscellaneous, you can change at which URL the Help option points towards, so you can move the chm file whenever you want, or even point to any other file.

Have fun!