Tag Archives: textpad

Building with Ant from TextPad

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A step towards making TextPad a lightweight IDE. Using the trick below, you can compile your code using Ant from inside TextPad. Click on the error messages and jump to the source file and the problematic line of code.

  1. First, make sure you can compile from the command line using Ant
  2. In Textpad, go to Configure-> Preferences-Tools.
  3. Click on the Add button and select the Dos Command option
  4. Enter ant -find in the edit box and press OK to dismiss the dialog box.
  5. Now press the Apply button
  6. In the left pane, expand Tools and highlight ant -find
  7. In the right pane, select capture output and save all documents first options
  8. Enter the following Reguar Expression ^[ \t]+\[javac\] \([A-Za-z]:[^:]+\):\([0-9]+\):
  9. Set File to 1 and Register to 2

All done. To run Ant, select it from the “Tools” menu. The build.xml file should be in the same directory, or in any ancestor directory.