Saturday, February 21, 2015

Type less - how to use GExperts macro templates

With all these articles and presentations about the PPL you might have seen this often. Calling TThread.Queue (or TThread.Synchronize if you are doing it wrong ;)) to execute your VCL or FMX related code in the main thread.

Are you still typing this code wasting precious time? Well then this article is for you!

I see this so often in presentations by people that should know better given their many years of Delphi experience. And to be honest - I am guilty of that too. I could spend way less time writing stupid code (with stupid code I usually refer to boilerplate code like this).

Disclaimer: I tried using live templates also but man that sucked and invoking the macro always killed the selection in the code editor.

Open the GExperts macro templates (default shortcut is Shift+Alt+T) and click on configuration.


After you click OK you enter the following code into the editor (with a trailing line break):

TThread.Queue(nil,
  procedure
  begin
    %SELECTION%|
  end);

So it looks like this:


The %SELECTION% tells the macro to insert the selected text here and the pipe tells it to set the cursor to this position after.

Click on OK now and select some source you want to invoke in the main thread.
Press the shortcut for macro templates, type queue and press enter, boom, done.

More time for awesome code or creating more of these templates!
(or to watch funny clips on the internet ...) ;)

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