In the last 24 hours I rolled out some changes I actually personally needed to get way more productive than ever on nikki, and leave my old-school IDE turned off.
If you are new to nikki, you might want to read this introductory post I wrote a while ago.
What’s new?
Probably the most needed feature, at least by me,
is to be able to look for a text in files, and
it has been rudimentally implemented
while I will focus, in the next days, on how to
make this much more user-friendly: in any case,
by activating the search bar through ctrl + shift + g
you are going to search in grep mode, which means
that instead of looking by file name we are gonna
grep the content of those files.
As you see in the screenshot above, Nikki then returns you a list of files and highlights the matches: what I want to work on, then, is to be able to click on those matches and open that file at that specific line.
How about other changes?
- we are watching the FS now, so if you touch a file from your terminal you’ll magically see it appear in nikki!
- when searching for files with
ctrl + shift +fyou are now gonna be able to also look for directories - generally improved the search: now
proj gu .jswill match/path/to/projects/test/gulpfile.js - nikki will now show the current focus (filesystem / search / editor) right above the editor
- added the awesome nikki logo
- you can configure the keyboard shortcuts
- you can now delete files and directories: simply hover on a file and press
delete
What’s fixed?
- when you move between tabs, now nikki will remember the position of the cursor on each tab
- issues while focusing on the filesystem
- nikki would epically crash if you have an open tab that points to a file, you delete it, and then refresh nikki, as it couldn’t find the file
- fixed a crash when re-opening a tab after closing all tabs
- small, informative fixes
How do I get all this awesomeness?
As simple as running an npm install -g nikki if this is the first time
you hear about it: for the ones who already have it installed on their
systems simply run a npm update -g nikki.
Then open a terminal, type nikki and let the show begin!
What’s next?
I’m giving 100% priority to bugs before implementing new features: given I’m using nikki on a daily basis I usually find gotchas and fix them straight away.
If there are not gonna be too many fixes to do I will focus on making the editor “smarter”, by improving the search in files and adding find / find & replace functionalities (the ACE editor has built-in support for them, so shouldn’t be that much of a problem).
Keep an eye on the github project and let me know your feedback!