Internet fact #173 – If you make RPGLE lowercase it looks a lot prettier!

If you’ve ever read any of my many waffling techno-blogs about programming with the RPG language you will know that I have a bit of a love/hate relationship IBM’s Rational Developer code editor. But, just sometimes it does really small, but obvious, things that make me smile.

If  You SpEND LOTS OF TimE fixing weird TYPING CASE fluctuations in your COdE then dont worry – help is at haNd!

Let RDi tidy RPGLE for you in the blink of an eye

Just play with the editor setting and tweak them to your personal prefrfences at Windows > Preferences > Remote Systems > Remote Systems LPEX Editor > IBM i Parsers > ILE RPG

You can change the main settings and several subsets.

For example, I get annoyed that pressing ENTER will automatically close an IF/END loop and you can turn this off by un-checking “automatic closure of control block”, turn off automatic uppercasing, or you can set your if/end loop indenting value (but I still like 3):

The free form SQL formatter option is great (since I mostly choose SQLRPGLE nowadays):

Get your code how you like it just click SOURCE | FORMAT or simply press CTRL/SHIFT/F and *boom* it all looks prettier.

Nice work RDi team!

Manually select text and switch it to uppercase or lower case

Lower case: CTRL+SHIFT+Y (CMD+SHIFT+Y on Mac OS X)
Upper case: CTRL+SHIFT+X (CMD+SHIFT+X on Mac OS X)

Obviously be careful you are not selecting strings that contain case sensitive data.