The IDE for AppGameKit Classic is becoming harder to maintain for a variety of reasons. I'm interested to know if anybody is aware of an alternative open source cross platform option that we might consider to either sit alongside the current IDE or replace it.

I'm sorry I don't have an answer for you but I'm curious to know what the issues are with Geany?
I use it daily and I haven't had any problems with it at all.

@scraggle The way it's built on the Mac makes it quite tricky to work with (compiler problems mainly), whereas on Windows and Linux it's a bit easier to build. The version of Geany we use it quite old and perhaps we could solve our problems by updating to the latest version. Currently exploring options as maybe we could try that or see if something easier to work with might be available.

What about Atom?

Gosukiwi made an AGK plugin for it a while back and I've personally found it to be preferable to the Geany editor.

can atom broadcast? how hard would that be to implement where it's a must in my book. i expect it just launches the player and passes the project params in?

and, one thing i've appreciated about geany is that it seems lightweight. i tried atom when the plugin was announced and IIRC it seemed somewhat bloated.

i could be wrong. i've really only used geany

I really like Geany so my preference would be to try and update it to a later version as v1.24 is quite old now. I've used Atom with AoZ and I don't like it although it may be how AoZ have implemented it. I agree that the broadcast feature is a must and is one of the best features of AGK.

can atom broadcast? how hard would that be to implement where it's a must in my book.

Good question. I didn't think about that because I only ever use AppGameKit for desktop development. Isn't broadcasting handled by a separate exe/app? I'd imagine it's not much more complicated than interfacing with the compiler/debugger, but that's just a guess. I have next to no experience with developing this kind of thing.

I don't know about bloat, but Atom has always seemed very snappy to me, even with multiple packages for various development frameworks installed. But I know that's pretty subjective and could depend on a lot of factors. I may also be a bit biased simply because Atom with the AppGameKit plugin (with a couple slight modifications to support MacOS) is what finally allowed me to work with AppGameKit Classic on my Macbook Pro's retina display. The default Geany editor is a blurry mess on it. That'd probably be fixed by updating to a newer version as well, though.

i'd first update to current geany that we're all familiar with and see if that helps the devs maintain classic.

make it open source while you're at it

I agree, try a newer version of Geany first as I would imagine that is why a lot of people have stuck with Classic as they prefer Geany over the Studio editor.

@Virtual Nomad you got me curious about the broadcasting issue so I looked into it a bit. Just to answer your question, yes, it's totally possible and technically Gosukiwi's plugin already does broadcasting -- it's how the debugger works, as pointed out in this thread.

Plus 1 for atom, everyone is very impressed with it

I'll download the Atom plugin and give it a try so I'm got a good comparison.

[s]Downloaded but the compiler path is wrong. Where do I change it?[/s]

First impressions are that it isn't as intuitive as the Geany editor. Is there anyway to add buttons for things like undo, redo etc? or is there only pull down menus?

Is there anyway to add buttons for things like undo, redo etc?

I couldn't say for sure but it is a very configurable editor

Have a look at gosuki's githib because i am pretty sure the compile/run/stop are buttons specific to the AppGameKit version

AGK 1 had Code::Blocks as editor a similar and better (in my opinion) IDE would be CodeLite.
But I also vote, like some others, for the current version of Geany. Simply because it is lightweight.
However, I would recommend not to modify the editor itself to AppGameKit again. Rather write an AppGameKit plugin for Geany.
That way it would not be so maintenance intensive when new Geany patches or versions come out.

That would be my suggestion.

If we go down the Geany with a plugin route could the plugin be open source?

I've just downloaded Geany 1.38 and it looks like a decent editor and very familiar!

First impressions are that it isn't as intuitive as the Geany editor.

I won't go into all of the reasons I find Atom to be more intuitive, but the project panel alone is enough to keep me using it. Your project's folder and file structure is actually properly represented there. File management and project organization can be done directly from the project panel and it's a breeze. I haven't used the Geany editor in a long time, but if I recall correctly, all you get there is a list of all your source files with no indication as to where they are actually stored. That's fine for small projects, but for larger projects it's pretty nice (to me, essential) to have a more organized representation with collapsible folders.

That's probably the biggest reason I prefer the Atom plugin to the Geany editor (aside from it looking acceptable on a retina display), but it's nice to have some modern text editor features as well like multi-line editing, simple drag and drop editor splitting for viewing multiple source files at once, etc.

I think the problem with Geany is it wasn't working properly on mac

I'll spend some time with the Atom editor so I can see what the plus points are.

... all you get there is a list of all your source files with no indication as to where they are actually stored. That's fine for small projects, but for larger projects it's pretty nice (to me, essential) to have a more organized representation with collapsible folders.

That is correct.
But there is the plugin 'Geanyprj' and 'https://plugins.geany.org/projectorganizer.html' which also takes care of the directory structure.
If the functionality AppGameKit is not enough. These plugins could be extended. This would have to be checked before, if the licenses would allow this.

"

I think this was due to the old code base, but with the current version the problems should be gone.
But a Mac user could test this by installing the current version of Geany.
If TGC had already set at the launch of AppGameKit on such a plugin. This problem would not have arisen in the first place.

But who knows maybe there were reasons why they chose this path.

Thanks for the suggestions.