We released Komodo 5.1 alpha 2 a couple of days ago (shame on me for not announcing until now). Get it here: www.activestate.com/products/komodo-ide/download-ide/
Please try it out and give us your feedback:

This is the second release of Komodo 5.1 on the way to a planned final release around mid-May. There are a few goodies worth talking about in this release. (See my post about Komodo 5.1a1 here.)

Find highlighting

Komodo now highlights find/search matches in your buffer. Here is a short video showing it off. Sorry, no sound. This is my first screencast. 🙂

Here I’m doing a couple of searches using Komodo’s Vi mode. That highlighting makes a big difference for helping your eyes find where you want to navigate to.
Find highlighting is one of those “well, duh” features that we are now able to add with indicator support in Komodo’s editing component Scintilla. Indicators in Scintilla allow one to put visual markers on regions of the editor buffer independent of the syntax coloring information. Before indicators, syntax coloring styling and other styling (squiggly underlining for syntax errors/warnings, find highlighting, …) had to share 8-bits of data for each position (i.e. each character). That was awkward (playing with bit masks) and limiting (ran out of space in, e.g., HTML which uses 7 of those 8 bits for all the different syntax coloring styles). Another example is Komodo’s Tabstops — which were made a lot more usable in 5.0 because of what we could do with indicators.

Linux/x86_64 support

We’ve added support for a new platform: Linux/x86_64. This is our first native 64-bit platform build. Linux x86_64 installs are getting to be quite common, and typically the default install of Linux distros on x86_64 don’t include the 32-bit compatibility libraries. This means that attempting to use Komodo’s 32-bit Linux build wouldn’t work out of the box (it tends to work fine once the distro’s 32-bit compat libs are installed) — and hence was a common support issue. Hopefully, no more. As well, Linux/x86_64 users will possibly enjoy a slight performance benefit.

Localization patches from Davide Ficano (l10n)

Way back in the heady days of 2008 (before Komodo 5.0 was released) Davide Ficano (aka dafi) made this post on Komodo’s forums:

Localizing Komodo using Babelzilla dream team

that kicked off some starter work towards localizing Komodo. One of the necessary steps to getting good localizations of Komodo was to update Komodo’s chrome to more rigorously use DTDs for XUL (we were using these fairly well) and string bundles for JavaScript code (we weren’t doing so well here). Dafi whipped up a bunch of patches for this. Todd has finally managed to get those all checked in, so that Komodo is now in a pretty good state to start being localized.

Other stuff

In addition to the above, Komodo’s History feature is coming along:

• The same keybindings as your browser for Back/Forward should be working on all platforms.
• The side mouse buttons on 5-button mice should work for navigating the history.
• This history will now properly handle cleaning out URLs from finished remote debugging sessions.

As well we’ve a few more goodies that should be ready to show for a beta 1 release in a week or two. As ever, try out the Komodo nightly builds for the very latest stuff: