Quote Originally Posted by Lost-Ninja
I already use the method above, mainly so I can keep my macros synced between accounts. What I'm really after is the syntax checking so often when I write a macro I get it wrong in some minor detail which only lets me down when I really really need it. :shock: So having an offline macro editor with syntax checking would be awesome...

I did look at coding it myself but my only coding experience other than poor PHP skills and HTML etc is with Turbo Pascal... which I haven't used in ten years and wasn't particularly good then. Though it might be a good project to learn on...

*goes to look at it again...*
A syntax checking app might not be the easiest thing to get your feet wet with. Most development tools these days are aimed at visual design and RAD and you will find very little to help you do what you need to do.

Take a look at the free copy of Visual Studio .NET / C# you can get from Microsoft though. .NET has some good string handling routines and all types are treated as classes which makes code completion very intuitive and helpful, especially when learning the language.

A good starting point will be to come up with a set of syntax rules for macros. Once you have a list of rules the coding should be straightforward.

Another good thing about .NET / C# is the multitude of example code you can get. Particular interest to you will be "parsing" examples. There is a very good clean code example of parsing HTML tags which should be easy enough to modify to parse a macro instead.