For those who don’t remember, or are new to the newsletter, last year I did an article on ILEditor as a way to start to bring my code writing into the 21^st century. I also mentioned in the article that there was a new version, ILEditor 2, in the works. This was released earlier in the year and after a few months of playing with the features I figured time to update my thoughts. As with last time if you don’t have time to read me waffle on about the product I’ll cut to the chase and offer you the link now: https://ileditor.dev/

For transparency purposes, I did win a 1-month license through a twitter competition. Although I then decided to buy myself a 1-year license after that expired so I think it speaks to the fact I’m happy to put my money where my mouth is on this one.

Our first point then, unlike the previous version this one is a paid product. £24.99/month is the base price, although there are discounts for bulk purchases and/or annual payments. I happened to make my purchase during a sale so got it a bit cheaper still, if you watch @ILEditor2 on twitter then you might catch the next one.

Moving onto the program, the first thing to note is that where ILEditor used an FTP connection you’re now using SSH. If you have the the open source environment on your system then odds are you already have the SSH daemon running, but if not, you’ll need to do a bit of initial configuration there.

On your left hand side you’ll see a few tabs to explore, starting with the member browser. You can, through the settings tab, specify the source files to show here and click into each one to view the members and the source. As a little side note here, and a quality of life improvement, in ILEditor you had to specify which language formatting you wanted to use (RPG/RPGLE/SQLRPG/etc) whereas in ILEditor 2 it does a good job of figuring that out for itself.

Still playing with my program info routine from last months article.

Two main improvements in the actual source editing that I really like, the first one (and probably least important) is the SRCDAT on each line can now be kept! A little thing but I really do like being able to check when a line was last updated, you do need to have the db2util package installed for this to work. The more important one is the ability to have live errors in your source code, by putting a tag at the top of my source member such as //compile:crtsqlrpgi the editor will keep an eye on me as I go and flag if I’ve got any problems that would stop the compile from running.

You can also use it to view definitions and usage of fields, so I’ve taken the opportunity to spring clean and chop out some old work/key fields that apparently I don’t need anymore.

Next you have an IFS browser, which again does a good job of detecting what syntax it should be using. So, if I have a falling out with VSCode at some point I can still do my NodeJS with some colour coding on my source.

You also have, as of one of the recent releases, the option to search a source file / IFS folder. Think option ‘25’ on the PDM interface, this could be really helpful for me as I recall the last time a customer moved offices and I was told “find every program that calls it <x> and change to <y>”. Over 400 source members identified for those who might be wondering!

Assuming you’re on a new enough release (V7R2+) and have your PTFs up to date you can run Code Coverage, there’s also an option to import results from an external run of the CODECOV command and review in ILEditor2. The main reason you might want to do this is that, at present, ILEditor2 doesn’t allow you to submit with parameters on the call.

Finally for the tabs you have a Git client, for all your source/version control needs. This is probably the function I’ve experimented with the least as I’m still learning how one Gits (I’ve decided that’s the verb,) but reading through the documentation it sounds like all the basic options are here.

If you do manage to break something, or perhaps have a suggestion for improvements, there’s a handy github page: https://github.com/halcyon-tech/ileditor2-issues/issues personally I’ve found the team behind it very quick to respond, and open to ideas from the crowd.

I could carry on going through each individual feature for ages, but hopefully by now you get the idea. I like this a lot, if you’re looking for a new code editor and willing to put hand in pocket then consider giving this a shot. There’s also a free-trial available, so if you do try it and decide it’s not for you then at worst you’ve wasted a little time?