The Official IDL Extension for Visual Studio Code

Brought to you by the creators of IDL and ENVI

IDL is the go-to language for image processing and is the backbone for
ENVI, the industry-leading application for spectral and image analysis.

About

An open-source extension which brings IDL (Interactive Data Language) to Visual Studio Code! This extension does not include IDL, but you can download it from our website here.

This extension includes:

• A full-featured IDL code editor, with variable type detection, auto complete, chromacoding, problem reporting, and code formatting

• Does not require IDL to be installed to write/edit code. IDL is only required when debugging/running code or using IDL Notebooks.

• An integrated debugger with breakpoints, or run command-line IDL within the VS Code terminal

• Native support IDL Notebooks with embedded graphics and save to PDF (this is from VSCode, does not require Python)

• Hover help contains the complete documentation for ENVI and IDL, including examples that you can open in IDL Notebooks.

• Create routine-definition documentation for routines within SAVE files or DLMs

• Support for internationalization

  • Submit a bug/feature for adding languages. Hopefully they are for a language that you speak, so you could also help with the translation :)

Check out our official docs site to learn more about these features and what else is included in the extension.

IDL and ENVI Requirement

You do not need IDL installed to write code with this extension. If you are using IDL Notebooks, the debug sessions of IDL, or running IDL in a terminal window, you will need to have IDL installed on the same machine where VSCode is running.

While there are many versions of IDL out there, we test the extension against the two latest versions of IDL. As of right now, that would be IDL 9.1 and IDL 9.0. Any other version is use-at-your-own-risk and may not work (you need lists, hashes, and ordered hashes for it to function).

IDL Notebooks have specific version requirements for IDL and ENVI:

• For IDL, you'll need IDL 8.8.0 or newer (enforced, and checked, when notebooks start)

• For ENVI, you'll need ENVI 6.0 or ENVI 5.7. Any other version of ENVI is not guaranteed to work.

Known Issues

• Not an issue, but structure definitions are only found in procedures that end with "__define" following IDL's standard. If you define structures anywhere else, they will not be detected and you'll see a error regarding unknown structures.

• By default, the language server that parses your IDL code is limited to about 1.5 million lines of code. If you notice that the extension is running out of memory (language server crashes), one workaround is to install "node.js" and ensure that it is on your system path.

  When the IDL extension starts, if it finds node.js on your path, it will automatically start the language server using node, which should remove this limitation. If you still see memory errors, then reach out to us on GitHub and let us know.

  To install node.js, get the latest v20 release from https://nodejs.org/en/download/releases.

• The debugger is back and has some improvements. However, this is still a pre-release version of the ability to interactively run IDL code. Here's a few important things to know:

  • Pausing is not supported on Windows, this will hopefully be resolved in the near future. Currently it kills the IDL process and is being worked on.

  • If you find reproduce cases where syntax errors are not appearing, or are not going away, please file a bug report.

  • If syntax errors are not going away then you can: reset IDL, restart IDL, stop and start IDL again and they will disappear.

  • You may occasionally see some text that is printed to the console when IDL is running, this is a known bug that happens for a few rare cases and can be ignored.

Release Notes

See CHANGELOG.

Credits

• For the licenses and copyrights of 3rd party dependencies for extension components, see 3rdpartylicenses.md.

• Icon theme:

  • The icon theme is directly from VSCode and only modified to use a different icon for PRO files (use our own instead of the prolog owl icon). Credits and auxiliary files can be found in ./extension/icon-theme.

• Themes

  • Original source licenses for the VSCode themes can be found in: extension/language/themes

  • Retro IDL: Licensed under MIT. Copyright (c) 2015 Mahmoud Ali, Atom One Light Theme

  • Novus IDL: Licensed under MIT. Copyright (c) 2015 Mahmoud Ali, Atom One Dark Theme

  • Neon IDL:

    • Based on: Licensed under MIT. Copyright (c) 2015 Mahmoud Ali, Atom One Dark Theme

    • Some workbench colors from from: Copyright (c) ssmi, After Dark

• Syntax highlighting

  • Legacy highlighting theme based on Mike Galloy's idl.tmbundle. Has since been completely rewritten as YAML and following other patterns/different regular expressions, but some roots are still there.

• Icons

  • The icons used in VSCode either come from Material Icons (Google via npm "material-icons") or Material Design (Templarian via npm "@mdi/js")

  • PDF icon is from "Material Icon Theme"

• PDF Generation

  • We use a 3rd party extension called "Markdown PDF" to create PDFs

  • Credit goes to yzane as the creator of this extension

Usage Metrics

The IDL extension for VSCode collects anonymous usage data on the extension. The goal of this information is to improve the overall experience, focus development on tools that users work with the most, and make sure our software can run on the average user's hardware.

IDL for VSCode uses the VSCode root preference for telemetry (telemetry.telemetryLevel) as an indicator if we should send usage metrics or not.

To disable reporting usage metrics for VSCode, see here for more information.

To learn more about what we collect and why, view our USAGE_METRICS guide.

Legal

Copyright (c) 2024, NV5 Geospatial Software, Inc.

Licensed under MIT, see LICENSE.txt.