[Jan de Lint]

Thomas, since you stress the importance of a VCS, here are my two cents:
Modern IDE's are integrated with a VCS, primarily with GIT, which helps a lot with the learning curve. As a spin-off it is a natural to be able to invoke a sophisticated diff view so that the changes (= progress or mistakes ) made become evident.
Examples are Web Storm (or PHP Storm) - commercial - and Visual Studio Code - open source. Both also support other VCS-es besides GIT. I use both for Web development and full stack development. Both can accommodate all sorts of programming languages.
Would't it be nice if somebody wrote a VP plug-in for one of these IDE's plus a VP Command Language Interface - CLI - which does the compiling/testing in the background?
]an

[Thomas Linder Puls]

Then you just need to find "someone" .

Some people internally at PDC also uses Web Storm (or was that last year ) and Visual Studio Code, five years ago it was Eclipse. I have no experience with Web Storm, but I have tried Eclipse and I regularly use Visual Studio Code. I never got used to Eclipse, but I think Visual Studio Code (VSC) is an excellent system.

I believe it will be easy to create token coloring in VSC, and probably tractable to achieve "Go To Definition/Declaration" facilities. For building I think you will have to rely on the vipBuilder, meaning that you will still have to maintain a project file (using the Visual Prolog IDE). But what I can't imagine being "manageable" is debugging. I think it would be a huge task to facilitate debugging in such a foreign system.

All in all I think that many things can be shifted/duplicated to foreign IDE's, but there are some that will be difficult (~impossible) to facilitate, so the VIP IDE will still be necessary for many things. So the question is whether the effort really pays back. Is it really that big a problem to have two IDEs open?

Regarding Diff I am quite happy with Beyond Compare.

If any of you use it you can try the attached settings. Besides a plain Visual Prolog compare, it also contains the possibility to preprocess source files with the Visual Prolog Pretty Printer (vipPP.exe), but for that to work you will have to update the setting to point to the location where you have vipPP.exe (i.e. C:\...\Visual Prolog 8\bin\vipPP.exe).

We also call Beyond Compare from Vault for both diff and merge.

[Harrison Pratt]

Thank you for the Beyond Compare (BC) settings for VIP! The syntax highlighting is very helpful.

I recently switched to BC from the free version of Devart's Code Compare (CC). BC is more feature-rich, but CC worked very well for me. An unexpected "bonus" in BC is the ability to compare CSV files as though they were sorted database files--very handy.