Comments on: VBA Editors

By: Bahadir Ozkurt

Bahadir Ozkurt — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:10:00 +0000

I never felt the need to work outside the VBE until today. Today I really wished for folding within VBE. It saves a lot of time and focus to write big chunks of code and then fold and scroll past it as if it's one line.

As a side note, I use EditPad Pro after having tried several others, it has extensive (to the extend of my capabilities at least) RegExp support as well as multiline/multifile search/replace, fold in place and "copy/paste lines containing ..." facilities. Furthermore the creators of this program have a free regex helper tool which really is a nice guide to create mediocre regexp phrases.

By: Fabrice

Fabrice — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:24:00 +0000

One thing really missing in VBE is the ability to scroll down with the mouse wheel.
To work around this limitation I use FreeWheel, a small piece of programm written 10 years ago...
Available here : http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2060/freewheel.html

By: alan

alan — Tue, 27 May 2008 23:35:00 +0000

jedit is my IDE of choice and it handles everything (text based code) wonderfully.

for quick-coding on windows, I use notepad++

my big question/issue is excel - am I supposed to import/export every time I want to edit the VBscript? Is there no way to auto-link to an external file? how weak is it that I have to remove a class and then import the class to run it? if the script editor that came with excel didn't suck i could just use it, yes I know... but there is no syntax highlighting, no diffing, no folding, no regex searching, no anything I rely on... well, it does let me type.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:06:00 +0000

John – What’s the pop-up error?

By: John Richter

John Richter — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:50:00 +0000

The program TextPad is the most ingenious editor I have ever seen. I like things simple too, but the VBE has a very annoying pop-up error message that frays every one of my nerves. TextPad doesn’t to that. Neither does NotePad. But, TextPad allows you to keep full libraries of subroutines that can be called into the document immediately with a simple click. No more of “I know that routine was in one of these excel apps, now where did I put it……….” As far as programming goes, I think the guys who created TextPad deserve a NobelPeace Prize.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 03:04:00 +0000

"My company wouldn't let me install it [MZ Tools]"

My company lets me install whatever I want. Oh wait, I own my company.

Freelancing hath its privileges.

By: Klausnrooster

Klausnrooster — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 10:16:00 +0000

I do VBA every day and am a big fan of Kusleika, de Bruin, Bovey, Walkenbach, Peltier, Blood, Pearson, Erlandsen, McRitchie, Colo, … all you guys. I found this post while googling for another I saw years ago about recommending to paste code into fresh modules under certain conditions. I swear I’ve seen some weird behavior in the VBE lately, but I think it was because I used “_” in procedure names. If you do a lot of VBA you’ll know why that’s not a good idea. Recently I’ve hit on trying to do cheesy “metaprogramming” (abusing the term). I’ve always edited code in regular Excel worksheets using formulas to build strings. Now I have written a class that takes input(box) and output strings to the Immediate Window or to a worksheet for later pasting. It includes Loop and Conditional constructors to do nesting and indentation (pushing and popping indent levels from a stack class {Forth, anyone?}). The input for those inputboxes is an equally cheesy markup language, if you will, so.. /S to start a Select Case and S/ to end it. Another thing in the class is a Class Module helper to do all the Dim, Get, and Set/Let for properties. But the feature I use most is a Combine & Concatenate helper (which I need to develo further as it is such a time saver). Ignoring many of the good naming conventions is a bad habit of mine, but I do find it helpful to end variable names in “zx” or other unlikely strings, so I can do find/replace on them for ” = ” (assignments). I keep the class in a file called “meta.xls” and I always have it open. I arrange the modules in the VBE (undocked) first thing and then I get Productive with a capital “P”. After I spif up the class I’ll offer it on Aaron Blood’s site in case anybody is interested. I used to employ AutoIt to type in the VBE but not since I wrote my meta class. But AutoIt is a great way too. Whoever mentioned Crimson editor – I can say rectangular selection is nice to have. That’s the one feature I wish VBE had. I don’t want to get hooked on MZtool or other extensions/addins. My company wouldn’t let me install it and even if they did sooner or later I’d have to re-install it. Plus I’d be disappointed (or lost?) on every machine that didn’t have it. Maybe some day I can work doing VBA and Excel exclusively like some of you, then I could mod the VBE with wild abandon!

By: NOSLOW

NOSLOW — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:10:00 +0000

EditPlus with syntax highlighting works great on .bas files. I use the VBA IDE 99% of the time, but ALWAYS copy and paste code into a scratch pad file that I keep open all the time. I’m sure everyone has lost some code due to an Excel crash or freeze at one time or another. I guess I have a bad habit of writing too much code (err…too much *bad* code) while VBA is “paused”, which means I can’t save often. Copying and pasting VBA code into a text file works well and has saved me lots of code!

EditPlus is more like a swiss army knife for text manipulation. One great feature is the ability to select columns of text…something you just can’t do inside the VBA editor. It’s a great feature for whipping together long Select Case statements from messy text acquired elsewhere.

By: wkb

wkb — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 04:32:00 +0000

I go with the crowd: the built-in IDE is the most useful and convenient for Office. But if you leave the office and start anything like embedded development, you'll need a good editor; my choice is UltraEdit32.

Historical note: my first DOS based editor was Brief. I think that was owned by Borland at the time (early 90s), and cost about three times what you pay for a good commercial editor today.

Regards,

Bill

By: Doug Glancy

Doug Glancy — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 19:01:00 +0000

Actually, I just learned about this thing called "Google". There's also this site called "Wikipedia" which seems to have lots of definitions, such as this for code folding:

"Code folding is a feature of some text editors, source code editors and IDEs that allows the user to selectively hide and display sections of a currently-edited file as a part of routine edit operations. This allows the user to manage large regions of potentially complicated text within one window, while still viewing only those subsections of the text that are specifically relevant during a particular editing session."