There was discussion about using an external editor for scripting. Some people are unaware there is a Debug Setting that allows one to select which editor they want to use. In Debug Settings it is:

ExternalEditor – Path to a program used to edit LSL scripts and XUI files, e.g.: /usr/bin/gedit –new-window “%s”

The feature is set in Preferences in some Third Party Viewers (TPV).

Editors

I think the more popular editor is LSLEditor. It changed from a purchased editor to an open source project some time ago. You can find the down loads in Source Forge as the LSL Editor Community Edition now. It is version 2.46.0.

The SL Wiki lists a number of its features: Second Life Wiki > LSL-Editor. There is a list of known bugs in the wiki: LSL-Editor Bugs. It seems to be a bit out of date. Cross bugs listed in the wiki with the LSL Editor’s Bug Tracker at Source Forge.

The wiki has a list of alternate editors one can use with the Linden Scripting Language.

New SL Feature

Andrew Linden is working on a syntax service. This feature would allow the editor built into the Viewer to pull up to date syntax information from the region servers. This would greatly ease keeping the LSL language and editor up to date.

An additional feature is a service that would allow manual or API pulls of the syntax information by other programs, such as LSLEditor.

This is sort of a side project by Andrew and does not get all the time some of us would like to see, including Andrew.

Auto-Complete

There is talk about adding an auto-complete feature to the viewer’s built-in editor. That is the main reason I use LSLEditor for even tiny, quick, and dirty scripts.

Max Character Limit

It seems there is a maximum character limit the built-in editor will allow. It is around 65,000 characters. After that things get flaky losing parts of the code and the script refuses to compile. No error message is generated, so it may be hard to tell what’s gone wrong.

All characters typed into the script count against the limit. So, characters in comments count.

Kelly Linden thinks he upped the character limit to 128k sometime this year. However that limit would have been changed server side as Kelly doesn’t work with the viewer code. Hitting the server side limit will generate an error notice telling you what happened.

Some quick searching by attendees and Kelly found the limit in panel_script_ed.xml, a viewer file. It is set at: 65,536. Kelly says the server side limit is HUGE and recommends setting the viewer limit at 1mb.

A JIRA is being made to implement the change. The editing panel in the viewer may have a memory limit. So, simply changing the XML file limit may not enable larger scripts… but it might. I don’t have a need to test this… yet.

The file is in: \Program Files\SecondLifeViewer\skins\default\xui\en\

The exact path is dependent on which viewer, skin, and language you are using.