The New POV-Ray Editor

Since the late 80s or early 90s of the previous millennium I am enjoying
deeply using POV-Ray. I also like the comfort the existing POV-Ray
editor is giving to me. But still, my decades of working with POV-Ray
give me some demands I have on the editor that I want to share with you.
I am even a programmer, but i use Delphi (Pascal), and not C, and so I
cannot add my own work to the editor. Alas. I really would like.

1
The editor should be able to remember the settings, like to show a
margin on the left side with decimal line numbers. At the moment, the
editor cannot remember that setting.

2
Each tab needs to have a small CLOSE button (that famous "X") beside its
file name, that is something I really really need. Each operating system
has its own advantages and disadvantages, let's use the advantages
please. The permanent right or middle clicking and then selection menues
shouldn't be the only solution to close a file. I want to close a file
(or tab) easily.

3
Please make it possible that we users can re-arrange the order of the
tabs to our wishes and needs.

4
The file names inside the tabs could be slightly bolder if the
associated file is a .pov file (scene main file). This could help to
distinguish a little bit faster between main files and included files
when searching for a specific file tab.

5
Please give, instead of the so limiting 16 basic colors, a true-color
selection for the editor's preference colors. Thanks.

6
An embedded keyword corrector alerts in real-time or on button-click on
wrongly-spelled keywords (like "difference", "union", "object", and so
on). I am seeing a need for that, because having POV-Ray during the
rendering aborting on such errors, takes a lot of useless time if the
scene is very complex. The highlighted wrongly-spelled keywords would
then manually be corrected by the user, jumping from keyword to keyword.
While I wrote this text, I am working on a large, complex scene, where
the parsing alone takes almost ten minutes. I have errors, and lose so
much time for successless parsing. If the editor can offer a first
clean-up of the scene files, it would save so much time.

7
Here it comes: when opening a file (.pov or .inc), the editor should
recognize the included files within the POV-Ray scene code and offer
only then decently and silently an additional button, maybe inside the
tab, to open a list window of all related files. Clicking a listed file
name opens that file, too. This dialog can be closed with a CLOSE
button. This list window also offers another button that opens all
listed files. The need for such a decent listing is, that I am writing
large scenes, and often use many include files to make the main file
smaller. I need to open all related files that I created, but not often
I need to open the include files POV-Ray came with.

8
And another useful tool would be a feature, that checks each texture or
declared object or variable, if it is being used somewhere inside the
scene file or files (main .pov and included .inc file). Such a feature
could help to make large scene files (.pov or.inc) leaner. It highlights
the block of what is nowhere needed, and the user can delete it, or the
editor offers the automatic deletion of all of them. I self would prefer
the user's manual deleting, that is safer. Alternatively, the user could
highlight a part of the scene source code and have the editor checking
just within that highlighted area for unused items this area contains.

9
Not a function of the editor, but a REQUIRED function of POV-Ray: a
special switch should allow POV-Ray, instead of rendering, to create an
.stl file output of any given POV-Ray scene. In times of 3D printing,
this is just a must. POV-Ray gives us such an immense control over the
scene, but what is this all good for, what are the decades of developing
POV-Ray good for, if we cannot bring our POV-Ray scenes into the real
world..?

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