Handy non-default settings for MPS

MPS comes with pretty good default settings, but there are some settings that I really like to change as soon as I have a fresh MPS IDE in front of my nose. Below is a description of such settings.

Hide empty aspect tabs

By default, MPS always shows all tabs for all aspects (also aspects that are empty) for each concept. I have found that I keep more overview when the empty aspects of a concept are hidden. You can change this, by setting the Aspect Tabs option to Each aspect node in a separate tab:

Hide generator warnings that you cannot fix

So far (right up until MPS 2019.1), MPS shows some really annoying “Failed to replace dynamic reference” generator warnings. They are annoying because they pollute the build logging and you cannot do anything about them as a language engineer. You can remove these (without being afraid that your languages will not be checked when you commit, because MPS checks all modified languages and models on every commit) by unchecking Show warnings in the generator settings:

Disable language checking in every build

When working incrementally on a language implementation, I often run many rebuilds with every small delta that I want to test for my language. Since model/language checking is not incremental, having a check every time when I need to build a language can take a lot of cumulatively collected overhead time. Therefore, I like to, by default, turn off the model checking for every build.

There is a caveat, though: since MPS’ language development workflow currently relies on languages/models being checked in the IDE and not in command line/buildserver build, you should do model checking before checking in! I still change the default setting, which requires more discipline from me, but saves me some time.

Disabling continous modelchecking can be accomplished by unchecking the item Build –> Check models before generation item in the menu:

Prevent auto-opening of last-opened project

For me, the reason of shutting down or restarting MPS is usually because I need to switch between projects or because I need to play with certain settings. This makes the default feature of reloading your last opened project upon MPS startup not very useful. I turn it off here:

Memory Indicator

This piece of information is provided thanks to Hristina Moneva (see coments).

The memory indicator does not only give you a way to see how much memory is allocated to the VM that MPS and your memory use, but it also gives you a way to do garbage collection manually. It is located in the lower right corner and looks like this:

Adding the memory indicator can also be done via the settings menu:

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