Tag Archives: BricsCAD V18.2

Mac users rejoice – at long last, a LISP IDE comes to OS X

What’s happened?

With the release of BricsCAD (Mac) V18.2 (currently V18.2.23-1 to be precise), BLADE (BricsCAD’s much-superior equivalent to VLIDE) has been added to BricsCAD

See here for the release notes and here to download. Make sure you select the Mac version:

Significance

This is pretty significant for anybody serious about using DWG-based CAD on the Mac. AutoCAD without LISP is hardly worthy of the name, which is why I’ve never been keen on AutoCAD LT from the moment LISP was yanked out of it just before release in the early 90s. There has never been an integrated development environment for AutoCAD for Mac (either in the first iteration in the 1990s or the second attempt in the 2010s) and I think I can safely predict that there’s never going to be one. I expect AutoCAD for Mac’s LISP to remain forever in 1990 mode.

Compatibility

One problem a small number of users may face when developing for Mac with BLADE is that of downward compatibility. In case you’re wondering, BricsCAD (Mac) to AutoCAD for Mac is very much a downward direction, particularly in the area of LISP. The LISP in AutoCAD for Mac is famously half-baked with large portions of functionality missing, including no ability to control dialog boxes. BricsCAD (Mac)’s LISP is very much more capable, so while compatibility between AutoCAD for Windows and BricsCAD (Mac) is strong, you can’t say the same for LISP compatibility between AutoCAD for Windows and AutoCAD for Mac.

Half of the stuff you write for AutoCAD in Windows is just going to fail when you try to run it in AutoCAD for Mac. Much more of it is going to work in BricsCAD (Mac). While you can now write, debug and run your LISP code efficiently in BricsCAD (Mac) and it’s practically guaranteed to run just fine in AutoCAD and BricsCAD for Windows, it will be very easy to write stuff in BricsCAD (Mac) that doesn’t work in AutoCAD for Mac. Of course, the same downward compatibility problem applies to writing stuff in AutoCAD for Windows using VLIDE.

If you’ve moved on completely from AutoCAD for Mac to BricsCAD (Mac), that’s not going to be a problem. Bircsys building a notably better product that’s significantly more compatible with the main game is not something anybody could reasonably condemn. However, but it’s something to bear in mind if you are hoping to write code that runs on both AutoCAD and BricsCAD for Mac.

Summary

That caveat aside, it’s all good news for Mac CAD users. You already had a product available that would run a much higher percentage of the huge library of LISP out there than AutoCAD for Mac would. For the first time in history, you now also have access to a professional LISP development tool. Lucky for you, it’s the best such tool on the market.

BLADE – putting things back to “normal”

2 Replies

Disclaimer: I’m making money using BLADE. I’m using it on a paying project right now (well, not while I’m typing this, but you get the idea). I’m developing a routine to automate a massively repetitive task for one of my AutoCAD-using clients, and I’m developing it in BricsCAD and BLADE rather than AutoCAD and VLIDE.

I can simply develop faster in the more modern environment, and BricsCAD’s significantly quicker start-up time helps with that. So does the fact that the routine runs several times faster in BricsCAD, making testing the large data sets much more efficient. I’m getting paid on results and not by the hour, so using BLADE is putting cash straight into my pocket while giving me more time to walk my dog.

Using BLADE in production, I’m discovering a few bugs, quirks and things I don’t like. That’s totally understandable with a new feature of this level of complexity and functionality. Where I think it makes sense, I’m submitting problem reports or feature requests to Bricsys. I’m sure Bricsys already has a bunch of these from other developers, so they’ll be very busy for a while. From past experience, I know my reports will be taken seriously and acted on appropriately in a timely manner, if it’s feasible to do so. Your LISP IDE feedback won’t be ignored for decades by Bricsys.

One of the things Torsten Moses mentioned to me that didn’t make it into the published interview was that many developers are very conservative. There’s some truth in that. I’m missing certain keystrokes, for example: 1978-era WordStar Ctrl-Y to delete a line, anyone? It’s a reasonable expectation that as more VLIDE users migrate to BLADE, many requests will come in for VLIDE-like things. I’m told that some of these things will be provided in coming months.

In the meantime, there are things we conservative developers can do to make ourselves feel more at home. One of these is to configure the editor appearance. Here’s the VLIDE editor:

Here’s the BLADE equivalent:

One of the great things about BLADE is how configurable it is, and I know Torsten’s working right now on making it even more so. Configurations are stored in the Registry in a version-independent location (HKCU\Software\Bricsys\BricsCAD\VLispDbgEditor). These can be exported and imported directly or via BLADE, so multiple complete setups and configurations can be managed.

In this post, I’m going to be going through the process of configuring BLADE’s editor appearance to make it look more like VLIDE. I’m not suggesting that’s necessary or even a good idea in most cases, but if you really want to do it, here’s how.

Note: before you do all this manually, please note that at the end of this post I will provide a configuration file that will do it for you.

Start up BricsCAD V18.2 or later and start BLADE using either the BLADE or VLIDE command.
Open a LISP file in BLADE so you can check the effects of the changes we’re going to make.
Use Preferences > Show preference dialog…
In the Preferences & Settings dialog, pick the Styles tab and the Lexer Styles sub-tab.
I’m perfectly happy with Courier New 10, but if you want the VLIDE look, change 1 – Default text to Fixedsys 11.
Click next to 3 – Comment, turn on the Background color toggle and change the Back Color to mid-grey (192,192,192) and Fore Color to dark magenta (128,0,128). You’ll need to specify that RGB value in the lower right corner and use Add to Custom Colors to do this.
Click next to 5 – String and change the Fore Color to magenta (255,0,255).
Click next to 7 – Operator and change the Fore Color to red (255,0,0).
The 8 – Keyword 1 setting should already be blue as in VLIDE. If you want system constants such as T, nil and pi to also be that shade of blue then change 9 – Keyword 2 accordingly. Personally, I prefer a different shade so they stand out. Mid-dark cyan (0,128,192) works well.
I like the pale grey background in BLADE that helps identify the current line. If you don’t, click next to 8 – Caret colour and turn off the Background color toggle.
Switch to the Editor Colors sub-tab, click next to 5 – Selection colour and change the Back Color to a custom mid-blue (0,120,215).
While you’re in the Editor Colors sub-tab, there are a few other non-VLIDE things you can play with. 1 – Brace hilight and 2 – Brace mismatch are dynamically applied to matching and non-matching parentheses respectively. I like my Brace hilight setting to be plum and bold (turn on the Attributes toggle to enable this):

I like my non-matching setting to be white on red (the inverse of a normal parenthesis so it shows up):

Changing all that should give you something that looks like this. Familiar enough?
There are several things in the above image that might be unfamiliar but which I suggest you leave turned on because they’re useful. If you really insist, here are the locations for these settings in the Preferences & Settings dialog:

Line numbers – View > Margins, Show line number margin
Marker margin – View > Margins, Show marker margin. If this is turned off, bookmarks show up using the settings under Styles > Editor Colors > 13 – Bookmark marker.
Edge marker (that vertical line on the right indicating 80 character width) – View > Edge marker > Type, No background.
Indentation guides (those vertical lines that show you what your code is lining up with) – Tabs and EOL > Indentation, Show indentation guides.
Code folding margin (the margin on the left that allows you to collapse functions, etc. – Folding and Wrapping > Show code folding margin.

Unlike VLIDE, the default in BLADE is to use spaces for indentation, not tabs. As I don’t know of any LISP developer who uses tabs except by accident, this is a much more sensible default. But if you really want to use tabs, turn it on using Preferences > Use tabs and set the width to the VLIDE default of 8 in Preferences > Set tab width.

If you’ve left opening parentheses on previous lines and have indented the following code as usual, then as you go on to finish off the code with closing parentheses, in BLADE a single backspace will take you back your indent width (2 spaces by default) rather than a single space as in VLIDE. If your coding finger can’t get used to this keystroke-saving feature, you can turn this off with Preferences > Backspace unindents.

Having done all that, and having arranged the rest of the interface to your needs (overall window size, pane and field widths, etc.), make sure you save it! It’s as simple as Preferences > Save preferences, but it’s not done automatically. If you want to keep a safe copy of your settings, you can do so with Preferences > Save preferences to file. This simply exports the relevant part of the registry to a .reg file of your choice. This is a text file you can hack about with at your leisure (using BLADE if you like!), and you can even make files that represent subsets of your preferences.

For example, I’ve removed all but the style settings from a .reg file I exported. I’ve uploaded it renamed as a .txt file because .reg files are considered dangerous by browsers, etc.

If you want to use this to give BLADE that old familiar VLIDE look, here are the steps.

Download SteveVLIDE-likeBLADEStyleSettings.reg.txt.
Rename the file to remove the .txt extension so it becomes SteveVLIDE-likeBLADEStyleSettings.reg.
In BLADE, use Preferences > Load Config from File
Close BLADE and BricsCAD.
Restart BricsCAD and BLADE.

That should do it. Happy BLADEwork!

Interviewing the creator of BLADE – CAD’s best LISP IDE – part 2

2 Replies

This post continues my interview with Torsten Moses about BLADE, the new LISP IDE that arrived with BricsCAD V18.2. See here for post 1.

Steve: I’ve noted before that BricsCAD execution of AutoLISP and Visual LISP is several times faster than AutoCAD’s. How does the new technology affect that performance?

Torsten: All the new BLADE-related stuff doesn’t really affect normal LISP execution outside the IDE and debugger. The connection is made by a few callbacks, which take zero time in normal processing. Therefore there is also no chance of breaking things. The BLADE implementation is very safe, and performance remains high for normal usage. For the debugger and the synchronization, it is all home-brewed stuff, optimized for best performance even when debugging, and minimum system and LISP memory usage.

In the course of implementing the debugger and internal versus external synchronization, I also removed most emulations and implemented that as core OpenLisp functionality. That has the side-effect that the (repeat), (foreach) and (vlax-for) functions now run about five times faster at the loop construction. So rather than slowing things down, creating BLADE has actually speeded things up!

Steve: Will the Mac and Linux versions also get this feature?

Torsten: Yes, it is fully compatible. This is due to the implementations of WxWidgets and my own stuff. I have already verified BLADE running under Linux. There are no differences; even the implementation code has no Windows-specific stuff.

Steve: Can you give a simple example of the workflow of a debugging session?

Torsten: First, don’t pre-load any LISP file into BricsCAD. Such code loaded outside the debugger is fully functional, but it can’t be used for debugging. The special connection between internal and external representation is only established when loading the LISP code under a debug state.

Next, in BLADE open an existing FAS or VLX project, and/or a “Named Session”, or simply any LISP file you want to start debugging with.

Now you can select Start Debugging from menu or toolbar, or hit the F8 hotkey. The special Debug Toolbar will appear. You can either activate AutoBreak, which stops at first executable code, or activate the LISP source where you want to start debugging and place some breakpoints.

Then load the dedicated LISP file, either by the normal Load into BricsCAD function, or from the Load button in the Debug Toolbar. Now that loaded code is debug-enabled and you will see the file and debug-enabled functions in the two right tabs.

When the debugger halts at the first breakpoint, all debug-step modes are enabled in the toolbar, and you have all the usual debug step modes. More than in AutoCAD’s VLIDE, actually. You can set the watches (observed and tracked variables) as “Data Break Point” by activating the checkbox. Then, whenever that value changes, the debugger also stops automatically at the related LISP statement.

Steve: What if your code calls code in other files you haven’t loaded?

Torsten: Don’t worry about that. The debugger recognizes this and will ask to load the related LISP file on-demand. In normal LISP, you would get an unknown function error but the debugger catches this upfront. In fact, this is one of the high-end features – only load the primary LISP file, any further debugging into other files resolves by loading during the debugging session. This is very handy for dealing with complex apps – there’s no need to preload any other LISP source. I’m sure you’ve experienced Murphy’s Law, where the particular function you need is the one that’s not loaded. You won’t have that problem in BLADE.

Steve: Where to from here? Is this job done or is there still room for improvement?

Torsten: As BLADE is still a very young product, there is definitely a lot more to come. So far, the main target was to provide good debugging features, and a somewhat reasonable handling of projects, but not so much focusing on plain editor capabilities.

My to-do list still has a number of major key features to be implemented. We want to add a hotkey editor, because every developer loves his own keystrokes and learning others is a nightmare! We also want cross-reference checking on a per-file and per-session basis, mainly for bigger LISP applications.

Then, over time, the editor capabilities will be extended and improved, providing more features. One example is to provide an editor tooltip that shows a function signature and short help when hovering over a LISP function name.

And of course, I’m aware that when people start using this in production, a lot of feedback will arrive from developers in the form of wishes, hints for improvements and bug reports. It’s very likely there will be many wishes to implement several details to make BLADE resemble AutoCAD’s VLIDE more closely. This could be a bit difficult sometimes, and is also not the main target. I hope that developers will be open to a slightly different workflow, given the big advantages they get in return.

In general we are very open to developer ideas, needs and requirements, as we are with BricsCAD itself. In the end, it’s the developer who needs to work with BLADE, as easily and productively as possible. Even the initial release of BLADE is based on important feedback from beta testers such as Martin Drese (CAD Wiesel).

Steve: I can certainly attest to how well you respond to feedback. I’ve seen bugs I’ve reported fixed in a very short timeframe.

Torsten, thank you for your time. This has been very illuminating.

This interview is also available in one post on the Bricsys blog.

Interviewing the creator of BLADE – CAD’s best LISP IDE – part 1

1 Reply

Easily the most impressive new feature of BricsCAD V18.2 is the new Visual LISP IDE, BLADE (BricsCAD LISP Advanced Development Environment). The lack of any LISP IDE has been a BricsCAD stumbling block for a while, dissuading CAD Managers from adopting BricsCAD to replace their stagnant and increasingly expensive AutoCADs.

As I will relate elsewhere, Bricsys has not just caught up with Autodesk here, but has shot so far ahead it’s unlikely to ever be caught. BricsCAD’s BLADE is so superior to AutoCAD’s VLIDE in so many ways there’s really no comparison.

Yet it remains highly compatible. I have personal experience in making large amounts of AutoCAD LISP code (literally hundreds of routines) work in BricsCAD. That experience tells me that the vast majority of code will work just fine (and much faster) in BricsCAD. A tiny proportion of LISP or DCL code may need adjustment before it will work perfectly on both platforms, and that’s one reason an IDE that works within BricsCAD was an important step that Bricsys needed to take.

I had the chance to see this IDE privately in then-unnamed pre-release form when I attended the Bricsys Conference 2017 in Paris. I was surprised and delighted at the functionality demonstrated by its creator, Torsten Moses. I recently had the chance to interview Torsten about his creation.

Steve: I understand it was difficult to create a LISP IDE for BricsCAD because of the way BricsCAD’s LISP works. Can you explain that?

Torsten: BricsCAD LISP uses the OpenLisp core system, from French developer Christian Jullien. This is the only LISP engine still under development; the others I found stopped development in the mid-90s.

OpenLisp is a very modern implementation, not comparable to the old XLisp dialect used by AutoLISP. Even object-oriented features are supported. Therefore the internal representation of LISP expressions is different from the textual representation as seen in a LISP file.

Steve: So the AutoLISP code I write isn’t the code that BricsCAD executes?

Torsten: That’s right. A number of typical AutoLISP constructions were implemented by a kind of emulation, which drives the internal versus textual representation differences even further. That makes it a major challenge to synchronize the internal OpenLisp expression execution with the related textual representation in order to provide any debugging functionality.

Besides the plain technical details, which seemed to be virtually unresolvable, there was the expected heavy effort to implement a full-blown GUI. This was not just a plain editor, but the entire IDE GUI. It would have been a disaster, a major disgrace, if we had provided a VLIDE that was just up to AutoCAD standards. That was great in its time, but it’s 20 years later now. The idea of creating a LISP IDE for BricsCAD seemed so filled with difficulties that we put it off for a long time.

Steve: How did you finally manage to overcome these difficulties?

Torsten: First, it was a pure coincidence. [laughs] By luck, I discovered a hidden detail in OpenLisp – any LISP symbol (and expressions are a kind of anonymous symbols) can hold unlimited, attached custom data, very similar to XData in DWG database objects. I even knew about that for many years, but never worked out the shortcut to ‘misuse’ this for the LISP expression execution to editor and debugger bidirectional connection. Some initial quick tests showed that this approach was very suitable.

By another coincidence, I discovered that WxWidgets (our cross-platform system, not only for GUI) already includes support for the famous Scintilla editor, an OpenSource editor engine, widely used by many editors. WxWidgets even provides two levels of wrappers – a plain, core wrapper, and a high-level wrapper class system. This fits perfectly into the WxWidgets logic.

But still, that is only plain editor support – not a GUI. Then I found a very suitable, extensible editor and GUI implementation, based on that WxWidgets Scintilla system – as Open Source under the WxWidgets license. Hence, we are allowed to use that source code in a commercial application. That editor is called wxStEdit.

I verified that this source was suitable for our LISP IDE, and put in a lot of extra work to extend it. wxStEdit development finished in around 2008, and it still was compiling and working mostly fine. Nevertheless, in the course of extending that GUI, I found and fixed a lot of defects at all related levels (Scintilla, WxWidgets Scintilla wrapper and wxStEdit).

So it was this set of coincidences that suddenly opened both wings of a big gate!

See here for part 2 of this interview.

This interview is also available in one post on the Bricsys blog.

Bricsys shows Autodesk how to do mid-term updates – again!

5 Replies

BricsCAD V18.2 for Windows is out. The new stuff in this mid-term update is again showing up Autodesk’s lack of progress with its once-flagship product, AutoCAD. I’m sure Autodesk would love customers to accept that there’s only so much anyone can do with a DWG-based CAD product once it reaches a certain level of maturity. Customers should get used to nothing of significance being added year after year. Diminishing returns, and all that. Pay to continue using the product, but don’t expect it to get better.

What a shame for Autodesk, then, that Bricsys exists. By consistently providing a raft of significant improvements with each full and mid-term release, Bricsys shows up that idea as nonsense. It’s perfectly possible to keep improving CAD at a very rapid rate, particularly if you’re not worried about competing with other products in your range. There’s a reason AutoCAD’s parametrics are restricted to 2D, and BricsCAD’s 3D parametrics in a DWG product proves that the reason isn’t technical. It’s strategic. Also strategic is cutting the guts out of an already much-weakened AutoCAD team, because you would really prefer your customers to be using your trendier and/or more expensive products.

I should point out that BricsCAD V18 customers who have a perpetual license, even without maintenance, will be receiving V18.2 with all its improvements free of charge. Contrast that with Autodesk, which is, despicably, withholding even bug fixes from selected customers. Autodesk’s attitude to customers who aren’t constantly paying up front is one of utter contempt. Autodesk feels entitled to your money; Bricsys wants to earn it.

So what’s Bricsys done to earn your money with BricsCAD V18.2?

Mostly, it’s lots of relatively small-sounding things that add up to significant productivity enhancements. There are several items that are playing catch-up to AutoCAD, such as long-overdue in-place text editing. There are big performance improvements in drawings with PDF underlays due to a smart multi-resolution cache mechanism. The 3D-to-2D generation mechanism has also been significantly sped up. Constraints (2D and 3D, unlike AutoCAD) are easier to create. Several 3D direct modeling operations have been made easier. That also helps with sheet metal design, which has seen other improvements.

In Bricsys BIM V18.2, a lot of smarts have been added. The mechanism for converting CAD models (including those made in BricsCAD Shape) to BIM models, BIMIFY, already did some fascinatingly clever things, but that’s been improved further particularly in the areas of structural member and room recognition. For those of us in Australia, support for our steel sections is very welcome.

For me, that’s not the big news. Oh, no. The big news for me is a thing called BLADE – the BricsCAD LISP Advanced Development Environment.

If you’re a CAD Manager or in-house developer and you’ve been waiting until BricsCAD had VLIDE, wait no longer. But this isn’t just catch-up. This is a big leapfrog over Autodesk’s sadly neglected IDE for CAD’s primary user programming language. There’s so much good stuff in BLADE that I can’t hope to do it justice here, so I will be covering it extensively in future posts. For now, here’s a statement for you:

If you program in AutoLISP or Visual LISP, you should be doing it in BLADE.

It’s that good. Really. Watch this space for details.

The download is small, the install is fast, it won’t harm your AutoCAD installation, and you can evaluate it free for 30 days. Links:

cad nauseam

Mostly AutoCAD, BricsCAD and related subjects