Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Finding References
Maybe I'm just getting old, but sometimes I don't see the obvious things in life. As you could guess from this blog, I have been using InnerLoop for some time now. One of the most common things I do everyday is to find references to a particular symbol. When I want to see all the places a particular symbol is used I usually start thinking, "where was that thing again?". Then I try to find which file it was in and then use ctrl-/ to find all the references.
I have no idea why I was doing it like this. What I should have been doing was just entering the symbol name in the little box that says "Symbol" in the references toolbar. For some dumb reason maybe I thought this was a read only box, I have no idea. Entering the symbol here immediately finds all the references and I don't have to remember where to find at least one instance of it just so I can hit ctrl-/
I would bet a lot of people have similar troubles with InnerLoop. The tool has lots of useful features, but sometimes it just takes some practice to find the most efficient ways to use it. It takes some experimentation to find all the ways that code can be displayed to get the most from it.
Just in case anybody is as clueless as I am, there is no excuse for not finding references very quickly now.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but sometimes I don't see the obvious things in life. As you could guess from this blog, I have been using InnerLoop for some time now. One of the most common things I do everyday is to find references to a particular symbol. When I want to see all the places a particular symbol is used I usually start thinking, "where was that thing again?". Then I try to find which file it was in and then use ctrl-/ to find all the references.
I have no idea why I was doing it like this. What I should have been doing was just entering the symbol name in the little box that says "Symbol" in the references toolbar. For some dumb reason maybe I thought this was a read only box, I have no idea. Entering the symbol here immediately finds all the references and I don't have to remember where to find at least one instance of it just so I can hit ctrl-/
I would bet a lot of people have similar troubles with InnerLoop. The tool has lots of useful features, but sometimes it just takes some practice to find the most efficient ways to use it. It takes some experimentation to find all the ways that code can be displayed to get the most from it.
Just in case anybody is as clueless as I am, there is no excuse for not finding references very quickly now.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Backup History
InnerLoop has a very nice feature that keeps a history of the files you edit.
This week I was working on some new features for my project. One of my co-workers recommended a better way to implement something based on a description I provided him. Since he is a very smart guy and usually knows what he's talking about I just started to implement it without too much thinking. I ended up editing about 5 different files with InnerLoop and suddenly realized I wasn't so sure this was the right way to go. Unfortunately, I couldn't just revert to the latest in CVS since I already had a bunch of other changes that I thought were good, but not complete enough or well tested enough to check-in. I really didn't feel like taking out all of today's changes manually.
To bail me out I turned to the backup history in InnerLoop. On the File menu you will find something called "Backup History". If you select this on a particular file you will see a bunch of numbered versions with dates and times. I knew the time I started all my changes and from comparing to CVS which files were changed. Using this backup history I selected a version I thought was before I got into this mess and hit the Diff button. Sure enough, it shows me all the changes I made. All I had to do was undo the changes by either merging them 1 at a time or merging all of them back into my file and things were quickly back to where I started.
I didn't change any configuration related to the Backup History, but if you are interested you can find more options for it on the Tools -> Options -> File Options dialog on the Backup tab.
I'm pretty sure emacs or vim would not have bailed me out of this quite so quickly.
Happy Coding!
InnerLoop has a very nice feature that keeps a history of the files you edit.
This week I was working on some new features for my project. One of my co-workers recommended a better way to implement something based on a description I provided him. Since he is a very smart guy and usually knows what he's talking about I just started to implement it without too much thinking. I ended up editing about 5 different files with InnerLoop and suddenly realized I wasn't so sure this was the right way to go. Unfortunately, I couldn't just revert to the latest in CVS since I already had a bunch of other changes that I thought were good, but not complete enough or well tested enough to check-in. I really didn't feel like taking out all of today's changes manually.
To bail me out I turned to the backup history in InnerLoop. On the File menu you will find something called "Backup History". If you select this on a particular file you will see a bunch of numbered versions with dates and times. I knew the time I started all my changes and from comparing to CVS which files were changed. Using this backup history I selected a version I thought was before I got into this mess and hit the Diff button. Sure enough, it shows me all the changes I made. All I had to do was undo the changes by either merging them 1 at a time or merging all of them back into my file and things were quickly back to where I started.
I didn't change any configuration related to the Backup History, but if you are interested you can find more options for it on the Tools -> Options -> File Options dialog on the Backup tab.
I'm pretty sure emacs or vim would not have bailed me out of this quite so quickly.
Happy Coding!
