As Senior Engineer Paul Lefebvre wrote back in 2022, Xojo added the ability to create Code Assistants starting with Xojo 2022r1. Code Assistants are functions that manipulate the code selected in the Code Editor to help with various code editing tasks. Code Assistants are written in XojoScript, but XojoScript has no access to the Xojo Debugger. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to this problem.

Xojo’s Code Assistant Tester example project makes it easy to test and debug your code before you create your Code Assistant. Go to File > New Project, click on Examples then open the IDE folder to find it. With this example, you can enter the code that would go into your eventual XojoScript that will be your Code Assistant. Because this code is in methods in Xojo itself, you can test it and debug it with the Xojo Debugger.

Here’s a quick video on how to use Code Assistants and the Code Assistant Tester:

If you write some handy Code Assistants, consider sharing them on the Xojo Forum they could be useful to others in the community.

Geoff Perlman is the Founder and CEO of Xojo. When he’s not leading the Xojo team he can be found playing drums in Austin, Texas and spending time with his family.

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Xojo’s team was all vaxxed-up and so happy to get together in Nashville for #XDC2022. Tennessee’s Music City was a delightful backdrop for the first in-person Xojo event since 2019. Check out the short highlights video from Nashville and then join us for #XDC2023 in London, UK. You can register here.

This year the Xojo team and community welcomed a new Xojo engineer, Ricardo Cruz. Ricardo has applied his expertise to advance and improve Xojo Web. To quote one of Xojo’s engineers, “Ricardo coming in has been awesome,” a sentiment echoed on the Forum and the community in Nashville.

Xojo Web has come so far this year. Control reliability has improved, IDE previews have improved and reconnections have really improved. The web framework can now more often reconnect back to the same web session if it still exists. This is one of the things Ricardo is really happy about, “You can switch to your email app in your mobile, copy something to the clipboard, come back to the web app and it is still there, ready to continue.” Under the hood, some dependencies received updates, like jQuery. As a user, you don’t have to do anything, just use the new Xojo version! Try to tell that to another web developer, that’s sci-fi outside of Xojo. Also, thanks to the community, the memory and CPU usage continues to be improved release after release. “Honestly from my perspective it is just fun to play with little projects in it because it has really matured,” says Xojo’s Director of Engineering, Travis Hill.

Speaking of technical achievements, this year we added two new targets to Xojo: Windows on ARM 64 and Linux on ARM 64. On Windows, you can natively deploy to ARM-based tablets and laptops that run Windows. On Linux, you can deploy to 64-bit Raspberry Pi which can address significantly more RAM than 32-bit versions.

We built the Xojo Cloud Control Panel with an updated version of Xojo, and thanks to some Web framework improvements the controls now stay more responsive under load. Plus we’ve added Xojo Cloud servers in Sydney, Australia for web developers in Australia and New Zealand. We also continued improving and testing our upcoming support for Android, which is now feature complete and awaiting some remaining bug fixes before we make it available to everyone.

In addition, we want to brag about a few technical improvements, including the numerous PDF updates implemented by Xojo Engineer and now PDF expert, Javier Menéndez. Also there is the option to generate Program Database (PDB) files on Windows and improved multi-monitor support shepherded by Xojo Engineer William Yu. The list goes on: Code Assistants, on-device debugging in iOS, new Xojo Documentation site, adding Controls at runtime, loading speed faster for big projects, and the time team-Lefebvre built a web app to Calculate Combat Rolls in Twilight Imperium…

Inside Xojo we improved a lot too. Besides welcoming Ricardo and his beard to the team, we migrated Xojo’s bug and feature reporting platform from the internally managed Feedback tool to the much loved Issues. This has increased productivity, streamlined work flow, made it easier to search and find, comment, edit. The team couldn’t be happier!

This year also included Xojo’s first Bug Bash in a long time! During the Bug Bash, Xojo’s Code Editor got some much needed improvements resulting in noticeably faster updates. Plus updates to the Syntax Help Area thanks to Xojo Engineer and retro-computing expert, Paul Lefebvre. Besides the very real smashing of 100 bugs, the bash had the unintended consequence of giving the engineers an opportunity to work on things they don’t normally work on, giving engineers opportunities to collaborate and better solve things.

All in all, 2022 was a year of forward movement for Xojo. Which has us leaning into 2023 with a lot of excitement and expectation. Our team is committed to continuing to make Xojo the best cross-platform development tool and we thank you for being part of Xojo’s continued success!

// This script takes the current selected comment
// and changes the comment prefix.

Function Name() As String
  Return "Swap Comment Prefix"
End Function

Function CanEdit(selection As String) As Boolean
  // Check if comments starts with // or '.
  Return Left(selection, 2) = "//" Or Left(selection, 1) = "'"
End Function

Function Edit(selection As String) As String
  // Swap // with ' or swap ' with //
  If Left(selection, 1) = "'" Then
    Return Replace(selection, "'", "//")
  ElseIf Left(selection, 2) = "//" Then
    Return Replace(selection, "//", "'")
  End If
End Function

This is not too lengthy, so let’s examine the parts. With a code assistant, there are three methods that are required: Name, CanEdit and Edit.

The Name() method returns a string containing the name that will appear in the Code Assistants menu. You can nest items using slashes, so “Paul/Swap Comments Prefix” would have this appear in Code Assistants->Paul->Swap Comments Prefix.

The CanEdit() method provides the code editor selection as a parameter. In this method you should return True if this code assistant is allowed to edit the selection. If you return True, the name will appear in the Code Assistants menu. If you return False it will not appear in the menu.

The code above checks if the selected text starts with the comment prefixes we want to swap: // or ‘.

The Edit() method is where you modify the selection, returning new text that will replace the selection in the Code Editor. This method does a single replace of “//“ with “’” and “’” with “//“.

Save the above script as SwapCommentPrefix.xojo_code_assistant and copy it to the Scripts folder in your IDE install folder.

If Xojo was running, you can tell it to reload those scripts by holding down Cmd (on Mac) or Control (Windows/Linux) when right-clicking.

Now type a comment like this:

‘ This is a comment.

Select that comment and right-click. Choose Code Assistants->Swap Comment Prefix.

The line now shows as:

// This is a comment.

For other sample Code Assistant scripts, go to Examples/Advanced/IDE Scripts/Code Assistants in the Xojo download folder.

Learn more in this video! Be sure to share your Code Assistant scripts in the forum!