[CaptainFlint]

Currently, the Plug-in Reference in the EmEditor help is a bit scarce. First of all, it tells absolutely nothing about EmEditor Template Library Header (etlframe.h), and (from my point of view) this file is by no means self-descriptive. This fact is even more annoying because this library looks really powerful and useful. Some of the plugin sources from this site use this library, but reading the sources is not the most efficient way of learning how to use the library.

Moreover, these plugins are way too old and don’t use all of the functions implemented by the latest version; actually, they don’t even compile with the latest version of etlframe.h — and some plugins (WordCount, for example) don’t include the appropriate version of the header files. To compile the plugin one has to cope with numerous inconsistencies, add missing definitions and methods, without knowing what these methods should do at all.

But etlframe is not the only problem. When I read the description of the OnEvents function, I had the impression that nEvent is the exact event ID. But when I looked at the OnEvents implementation in the etlframe.h, I saw the code like

if (nEvent & EVENT_CREATE) { ... }

Why is bitmask used here? Can nEvent contain more than one event in it?

In this thread I also wrote about vague moments in bitmap icon processing descriptions. Another issue is that EP_GET_NAME and EP_GET_VERSION are present as ANSI+Unicode couple, but again, absolutely no mention of it in the help, I noticed it only by looking at the definitions in plugins.h. Probably, there are other lapses, I did not yet meet myself.

To summarize all this, it would be very nice if the Plug-in Reference was more elaborate. For plugin writers it is the only source of information they can rely upon. Don’t get me wrong, the current Reference is nice and useful — the number of released plugins for EE proves this. But there are ways for improvements.

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