Hi:

I love 95% of PhpED, but it still has room for improvements. One area is in long text strings in the debugger's Local, Global and Watch windows. Currently one can toggle viewing strings in PHP format but when not in PHP format strings expand to full height and it becomes very cumbersome to find local vars. I find that 99% of the time I want to view strings in actual format, not PHP format so I have to constantly toggle between the two in order to find variables. This is especially true in apps like Drupal and WordPress where there are LOTs of variables. So here are the improvements I'd like to see:

• Provide a control for collapsing multi-line text strings to one line with a "more" indicator.
  
• Provide a control for collapsing and/or expanding all.
  
• Provide these controls as buttons in addition to on the right-click menu; using a laptop as I do right-click menus are VERY tedious (please consider this throughout PhpED regarding right-click menus.) You could put these buttons in a bar on the left margin of the Local, Global and Watch windows like you do for things like toggling line numbers in the Editor window.
  
• Give us buttons for Copy, Save, & View in PHP Format too.
  
• Provide optional filtering capability above the headers for name, value, and type. For example, if I type 'c' it should filter for all that contain, start-with, or end-with 'c' (you'll ned to give us a three-way toggle for those options)
  

Thanks for considering and keep of the good work on an excellent product.[/list]

thanks for the request. I have two question though

* and / will expand/collapse all. Is it what you need?


It shows, copies and saves in the currently selected format. Not?

I don't understand the question.



If I understand the question then yes it does but I have to keep toggling back and forth between the formats which is very cumbersome and adds "cognititive noise" to the debugging process. As you know during debugging things that are cumbersome can easily break one's concentration and that's not something we want when debugging.

ALSO, I just realized I would really also like to be able to search for a value while in debugging.

Normally the debug locals windows is fine in the way a program with only a small number of variables, but I use PhpEd to debug Drupal and they have a tendancy to create hundreds of variables in the current local scope using extract($variables). This makes it very helpful to have tools that help deal with hundreds of local variables. The same can be said for the debug globals window.

BTW, I recommend PhpEd to every Drupal developer I meet at the local user group so I expect you'll have more and more Drupal developers using PhpEd in the coming months.

Hey, and while I'm asking, it would be great to be able to view an HTML/XML snippet in a pop-up tree viewer. Drupal (and WordPress, phpBB, etc.) is filled with code that creates HTML snippets and visualizing what they contain can be a real pain.

Oh, and here's more....

Drupal has a lot of code like the following:



Problem is that makes it very hard to see the array the foreach is currently operating on, i.e. the return value of get_module_list() from my example. To get insight I find myself modifying the code to look like this:



That works okay, but usually I'm in the middle of debugging when I realize I need to see the list and then I have to restart, modify and run back to that point. Also, every time I upgrade the code to a newer Drupal version or add a new plug-in, I have to do it again.

What would be GREAT is if you would add some sort of psuedo-variable to the debugger which captures the current array context for the foreach() loop so we can see it. For that matter you could do the same for values evaluated in other statements like if, while, etc. This feature could save another HUGE amount of time.

Thanks in advance for listening.

"*" - is asterisk key
"/" - is divide key.
Those keys are available on the numpad and also with shift-8 combination for *.
"*" expands all nodes in the trees
"/" collapses all nodes in the trees.
And this keys working this way from the very beginning.

Is it what you asked for?

Ah, thanks for clarifying.

I just checked and it seems "*" and "/" only expand/collapse one row, not all rows.

Also, and I realize this is really only important to a small number of users who use their laptop for programming like I do, but my laptop doesn't have a numberpad. Yes I can use the Fn key to access the virtual numberpad, but it is very cumbersome. I tried to remap those keys but if it's possible it wasn't something I could find.

you may want to check is * and / are available somehow else on your keyboard.

I already checked, and not really, at least not in a convenient way. Anyway, the * and / don't see to do what I was looking for anyway; i.e. to expand/collapse ALL variables in the debugger vs. just one.

probably I did not make it clear
+ will expand currently selected node
* will expand currently selected not and ALL nodes below it.
- will collapse currently selected node
/ will collapse currently selected node and ALL nodes below it.

It's a common behaviour of all tree-view controls.

Thanks for the clarification. Point of note; none of those does what I was asking for though knowing about them is nice.

On the one point (of many) what I was looking for was something to expand & collapse ALL nodes, not just the currently selected one.