Many developers work with source code which resides in files with “non-standard” extensions. By a standard extension, I am referring to something like .cpp or .java. By a non-standard extension, I am talking about .ryan, or .data. I will show you how to quickly and easily set up your SlickEdit Core editor in Eclipse to handle these files the way you want them handled.

Let’s assume you have some file extension which is not already set up accurately in the default SlickEdit Core configuration. It might be something your company only uses internally. Let’s use .data for this example.

I have a workspace created which includes some .data files, and what I first see in the Navigator view is this:

When I go to open one of these files, Eclipse will use the standard Text Editor because it does not know better:

Not terribly useful…clearly the SlickEdit editor has not been opened, and we have no language support whatsoever. These appear to be COBOL files…so we should set up Eclipse to recognize them as such, and also tell SlickEdit that these files should be treated as COBOL code.

The first step is to go to Window > Preferences > Editors > File Associations and add *.data as a “New File Type”. Then select *.data in the list and click the Add button in the “Associated Editors” pane. Now select “SlickEdit Editor”. Make sure you mark “SlickEdit Editor” as the “Default” editor for this file type. Now we have told Eclipse to open all .data files with the SlickEdit Editor.

We are not quite finished yet. Now we need to tell SlickEdit to treat these files as COBOL. So, go to Window > SlickEdit Preferences > Languages > File Extension Manager and create a new extension for data (just data…not *.data), and assign the language to be Cobol 85. Click “OK”, and then click “OK” on the SlickEdit Preferences dialog. Now when you open up one of these .data files, you will see the correct editor opened with the correct language support.

The problem of retiring mainframe developers has been well publicized in recent years. Mainframe systems are not going anywhere, and programmers now expect to be working within the comforts of a modern IDE, rather than on a simple terminal. Eclipse-based front ends have become great solutions for this new generation of programmers working on mainframe systems.

Since the Eclipse IDE has become so popular for mainframe developers, we have been dedicating more and more resources to our mainframe language support. The SlickEdit editor is even now integrated into the Compuware Workbench:

Supports a vast array of programming languages for source code editing, powered by SlickEdit.

PL/I is one of the mainframe languages that got a major support upgrade in the newly released SlickEdit Core v3.7.1. The SlickEdit editor now has full support for parsing structures, includes, and even statement level tagging for PL/I code.

SlickEdit Core also has great support for COBOL, JCL, REXX, and other languages. If you are a mainframe developer coding in an Eclipse-based environment, try out the latest version of the SlickEdit Core plugin for free.

Last week we released our first public beta of SlickEdit v16.1 for Mac. This version replaces our previous iterations that used the X11 windowing system. Although we are using a cross-platform UI library which uses Cocoa for UI, and we’re writing quite a bit of our own Cocoa code for other Mac features like the Services menu, it doesn’t look like every other Mac application. And there are reasons for that.

SlickEdit is an MDI application
While there are some very well known applications that support a multiple document interface on the Mac, there is no real standard for how they should look and feel. Each application has a slightly different interpretation. As such we have chosen to keep our MDI implementation very close to what we have used in recent versions.

SlickEdit does a lot
This mostly affects how we present our application configuration options. Most Mac applications have a relatively small Preferences pane, perhaps with half a dozen categories, and a half-page screen of options for each category. But SlickEdit has 20+ years worth of features and configuration settings. Developers come to SlickEdit from a wide variety of editing environments, and our users want to be able to mold the application to their tastes.

SlickEdit is not just for the Mac
Like all multi-platform software, we have to make trade-offs between what might look best for a particular operating system, and what makes the most sense for a feature that needs to work on all of the supported platforms. There is also quite a bit of bias toward keeping functionality and appearance consistent with what long-time customers want and expect. SlickEdit has always placed a premium on letting you work with multiple languages on disparate platforms without having to retrain your brain and fingers. When implementing and tweaking features, we are constantly evaluating what a Mac user would expect, and what a SlickEdit user (regardless of platform) would expect.

SlickEdit will continue to evolve
While we do want to keep our product familiar across platforms, we aren’t going to be sitting stock still. While our immediate focus for the Mac is improvements to Objective-C language support, and better interoperability with Xcode project formats, we are looking forward to changes we can make in the user interface to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Getting this first non-X11 release ready was a big effort. And now that it’s almost done, we’re looking forward to making it the best it can be. We’re excited, and we hope that you will be too.

If you haven’t yet taken a look at SlickEdit 2011 for Mac, we invite you download our most recent beta version.