alited stands for a lite editor.
It satisfies most requirements of Tcl Editors, adding its own features. It pretends to be the best of the Tcl Editors.
The main features of alited are:
Edited by alited are Tcl/Tk files. The C/C++ code is another target of alited, still for development of Tcl/Tk projects all the same.
alited facilitates the development and the maintenance of Tcl/Tk code, particularly because of the unit tree being a sort of documentation.
alited is suspected of being very good with large Tcl/Tk projects, i.e. when, in one session, you deal with 30-40-50... Tcl/Tk scripts, to say nothing of others.
It is quick at starting.
It is quick at switching projects.
It is quick at organizing Tcl/Tk code.
It is quick at navigating Tcl/Tk code.
It is quick at searching Tcl/Tk code.
It is quick at writing Tcl/Tk code.
It is quick at testing Tcl/Tk code.
It is quick at saving Tcl/Tk code.
It is quick at maintaining Tcl/Tk code.
Briefly, alited is totally quick, being at that a pure Tcl/Tk application.
For a quick acquaintance of alited, a few of its demos are available.
For a quick installation of alited, just run an installer of alited. Then run alited's desktop shortcut.
Also, when you have Tcl/Tk deployed on your machine and like to install and run alited from its source, you need only to unpack alited's source to a directory and run it with tclsh src/alited.tcl command. Thus, in this case the installation of alited is straightforward as well:
-
unpack alited.zip to some directory, say ~/PG/alited
-
to run the installed alited, use the command:
wish ~/PG/alited/src/alited.tcl
In Linux, you can run tclsh instead of wish.
alited project started 1 March 2021.
In fact, alited has been developed by its own v0.2 since 24 April 2021. Inspite of permanent overheads of this way, it turned out to be amazingly productive, more and more in the course of time.
When developing a weekend or small Tcl/Tk project, you can nicely do it with Geany or Kate or something else. The situation becomes not so nice with middle and large Tcl/Tk projects, however good and smart those editors are (they are indeed).
What is the large Tcl project? The poApps by Paul Obermeier may be considered the canonical large Tcl project. Its main source directories (poApplib, poTcllib, poTklib) contain about 70 Tcl scripts of size 2.5 Mb (total about 150 files, 5 Mb). Also, alited by itself is rather large project containing about 60 main Tcl scripts of size 1.7 Mb (total about 1150 files, 5 Mb), so that no wonder its editing session includes 70-80 files.
It is with the middle and large Tcl projects that alited reveals all its best, while it has 0 Kb of dependencies for developing Tcl/Tk 8.6.10+ and is in no way a half gigabyte monster.
The cause is obvious: those other editors are not Tclish, while alited is. It is intended specifically for developing Tcl/Tk projects, not for being a universal plug to every hole. Going its own way, of course. Do not forget that it has been coded in Tcl/Tk.
By the way, sometimes I still return to the good old Geany or Pluma (when my alited is busy with an open dialogue) - just to confirm once more how good alited is.
One just becomes more productive with alited at developing Tcl code. Just so simple.
One day I decided to change the data format of e_menu because the old .mnu files seemed to be too complex. The e_menu project had started in 2018, when I was an active user of Geany. As a result, its main scripts (e_menu.tcl and e_addon.tcl) were seen as chaotic mixtures of procedures - no structure, no consistency, no order.
I tried and tried to implement the format change, getting in the real trouble with the task that seemed to be so hard...
Finally, in one moment, I decided to rearrange my scripts by means of alited, i.e. to make a proper unit tree and to place the code units in their proper branches.
It was only after the radical rearrangement of e_menu.tcl and e_addon.tcl that I felt the format change can be easily implemented. I did it in two days instead of two weeks as it threatened to be at first.
Along the way, I got two nice unit trees of code. Being two nice pieces of documentation too.
In other words, alited is a sort of code architect and documentation generator that organizes and documents Tcl code "on fly" along with the coding.
The unit tree of alited is so good that it by itself can drastically improve Tcl code and enhance the productivity of Tclers. Not to mention other sweets of alited.
Below is a screenshot of alited, just to glance at it:
and its localized and themed variant:
and its dark theme on Windows 10:
and its 1.6.5 version installed 24.01.2024 on x86 machine with Debian v6.0 (Linux core v2.6.32) and GNOME v2.30.2, deployed far back in 2010:
and its localized variant running under Wine of Linux Mint DE on x86 machine (with Windows console started by alited, Linux console started by Linux Mint):
