Use(s) less

- how to visualize your uses - for un-needed and wrong scoped units.

The "Uses" plugin installed and feed with a PAL report.

Disclaimer: Even if the above picture shows my usage of the code in the current state - the code/plugin is by no means done and complete - but I put this out for others to tinker with and benefit from.

One of the things that has been on my list of wish's for the Delphi IDE since forever, has been the ability to identify which units in your uses clause is either not needed, or should/could be moved from the interface section to the implementation section.

There seems to be good reasons for that feature not to be a 100% correct in it assumption in what is needed and what could be moved, and that might also be the reason Embarcadero has not included that feature yet, but..

I only need something that is good enough, and that can help me make the decision on what to clean up.

There are some third-party tools that attempt to do that, one being Peganza's Pascal Analyzer - and the free Lite version is sufficient to what I attempted to try here.

With the new CodeEditorEvents added to the OTAPI, it is now a lot easier to change the rendering of the code editor window in a safer way.

So this is what you need to do to get to a similar result - you need to download and install Pascal Analyzer (Lite).

Setup a project to handle your Delphi project, and you can optimizer the output from the analysis to only output the Uses.txt with only the Usage (USES1) - since that is the only needed.

I should mention that people more clever than me - could probably utilize the LSP or DelphiAST (or whatnot) - to make a more elegant solution - and they should :D.

So the prerequisite for the plugin is in place - a Uses.txt to parse. And to "refresh" the Uses.txt - you would have to run C:\Program Files\Peganza\Pascal Analyzer Lite\palcmd.exe <MyDocuments>\Pascal Analyzer Lite\Projects\<Myproject>.pap again.

The plugin contains code to parse Uses.txt and created a dictionary where each unit/module has a list of flagged units.

That dictionary is used to get the uses statements for the current unit, so that the renderer can either gray out or strikeout the unit name in the Uses clauses'.

As mentioned, the state of the code is more a prof of concept and does include code that is more a comment and an intent to what I had planned at that point of time - but it has now been laying around since summer, and I will not get this perfected in foreseeable future so it will have a better life set free.

The code can be found here: https://github.com/SteveNew/CodeEditorPaintTextPAL