I thought I would take a moment out of my busy Quest Code Tester development efforts (that is, heads-down coding, writing specifications, working with developers in Chicago, Columbus, St. Louis and Russia) to give thanks to Toad.
"Way back" in October (that's the way it feels, already), Quest released Toad 9. My initial reaction, probably like many other Toad users (and I do feel like I am quite the typical user, taking advantage of perhaps 2% of the total functionality of this tool), was: "Hey, why'd you change stuff?" and "Why does my editor look so strange now?" and so on.
Man oh man, I can be so resistant to change. I found a comfortable way to work within Toad 8.6 so that I barely had to look at the UI or the keyboard. I knew exactly which routes to follow, where to place my mouse, virtually by instinct. But resistance is futile, especially when you are a Quest employee who does lots of public presentations. I would get up to speed on Toad 9. And, of course, I really did want to start using all (some, anyway) of the new features.
So I took the plunge...and have been totally delighted.
First of all, while I mostly am a typical user, I also have some special needs: I use Toad when doing my trainings and presentations. And during those times, it is very important that I can adjust the UI to make it easier for attendees to read code, browser elements, etc. Now, Toad has always been able to meet my needs in this area, but in Toad 9 they go the distance and give me access to all sorts of properties about how text and code is displayed, particularly within the new editor (more on that below). So I not only benefit from the wealth of flexibility in this area, but so do all of my students!
One of the most important enhancements in Toad 9 is the new integrated editor. No longer do you choose between the SQL Editor and Procedure Editor. There is just one editor that handles all sorts of files, from SQL scripts to PL/SQL program creation statements to XML documents, and so much more (don't these guys* ever sleep?).
*Note: by "guys" I mean: the very talented and professional men and women on the Toad dev team.
And in this integrated editor, I now find all the conveniences of editing life found in the most modern of IDEs, including code folding and block selection. Code folding is very, very cool. If, like me, you write lots of packages, and lots of programs in packages, you know how challenging it can be to make your way through all that code, to focus on the particular program or lines of code of interest. Even in Toad 8.6, the Program Navigator was a big help in finding my way through my programs and local subprograms, but now even within a particular program I can avoid being distracted by unnecessary details. Here is an example:
I am building the code to populate Quest Code Tester's Quick Build profile tables (Quick Build helps you quickly construct unit tests for a variety of common scenarios, like "Insert one row into a table."). The ins_boolean_profiles procedures calls a number of other programs:
Notice that the red line above the procedure header helps me visually pick out the start of new programs. And the yellow boxes in the "gutter" point to parts of the code that can be folded or hidden. Suppose I don't want to see all the details of the program calls. I simply click on the yellow boxes and compress those invocations:
Now I can see all the way down to the end of this procedure, which is my current interest, without having to scroll back and forth.
I can also use the feature to collapse entire programs, get them out of the way temporarily. Nice stuff!
And then there is block selection, also known as column or vertical highlighting. Consider the code below:
I need to grab all of the constant names, and put a comma after them, then plug that code into another program. Prior to Toad 9, I would have to simply copy the full lines of text into the clipboard area and perform some tedious editing to get rid of all the text to the right of the constant names.
Now, in Toad 9, I hold down the Alt key, then click my cursor at the beginning of my first constant and drag down to highlight the columnar/vertical chunk of text desired:
I then Control-C, move to a new editor, Control-V, replace "CONSTANT" with "," and I am done. Just lovely!
Of course, there is much, much more to Toad 9, and you can read about all of its new features here.
But these are a few things that stand out to me, making my life easier, and my coding more productive.