DCL Live Bridge v1.0

[MAzri]

Hey everyone,

 

I just had the idea for this last night and figured I’d give it a shot, since the logic seemed pretty straightforward using AI. I'm really glad with how it turned out and that I was able to get it working exactly how I wanted. Since it's been so helpful for my own workflow already, I've decided to release it here for everyone to use. If you’ve ever felt the pain of the "Edit-Save-Reload-Restart" cycle just to move a button 2 pixels, this might be for you!

 

DCL Live Bridge essentially gives you a "Hot Reload" for your dialogs. You keep your favorite editor open (Notepad++, VS Code, etc.), hit save, and preview it instantly in AutoCAD.

 

What it does:

• Live Preview: Open your editor from within CAD, tweak the DCL, and hit Preview. Done.
• Inline Converter: For those who prefer Inline DCL (keeping everything in one .lsp file), it has a one-click exporter. It handles all the messy quote-escaping and backslashes for you automatically.
• Smart Error Catching: It actually tells you which line number has a missing semicolon or mismatched brace before the CAD DCL engine crashes.
• Safety First: It scans your code to make sure you have an exit button (ok_only or is_cancel), so you don't accidentally lock up your CAD session.

 

The Command: DCLB

 

Quick Start: Just load the LSP, run DCLB, and go to Settings to point it to your editor's .exe. It’ll save your preferences to the registry so you only have to do it once.

Grab the code on GitHub and also below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's been working great for my workflow, hopefully, some of you find it useful too! Let me know if you run into any bugs or have ideas.

 

Cheers,

Azri

DCLBridge.lsp