The IDL Workbench

QUESTION: What in the world is the IDL Workbench, and how come I've never heard of it before?

ANSWER: The IDL Workbench is the new IDL development environment, released with all versions of IDL 7.0 on 28 November 2007. To quote from the ITTVIS web page:

[The IDL Workbench] is based on the Eclipse development platform. Eclipse gives IDL users the advantages of a modern, full-featured truly cross-platform development environment that includes the tools that users of today’s development environments have come to appreciate and expect.

Among the features of the IDL Workshop, ITTVIS lists these:

A cross-platform native user interface that gives users the same features and workflow on all platforms
Native plotform interface controls and conventions
A project-based organizational scheme that organizes source code, images and files in known directories for efficient storage and searching
Code editing tools such as syntax highlighting, drag-and-drop editing, hover help that provides syntax information about routines, and content assist to help you complete routine names
Code debugging that helps you quickly identify variables, breakpoints and problems with your code
User help features that includes cheat sheets that automatically execute IDL code examples and on-line help tutorials with more extensive examples
A plug-in architecture that allows easy integration of other components written for IDL and the IDL Workbench or Eclipse (for example, version control software such as CVS or Subversion)
Support for internationalization that allows IDL Workbench textual elements and labels to be localized in eleven Asian and European languages
Built-in access to live RSS feeds for continual access to new and improved IDL functionality, plug-ins and code contribution items (including access to the IDL newsgroup)

Here is an image of what the IDL Workbench looks like on a LINUX machine. It looks similar, and works the same, on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms.

The way the IDL Workbench looks on a LINUX machine.