Hi everyone, I'm kind of new to QB64, but am enjoying playing with it.
I have some questions for a couple of things that might help make me more productive.
1. Is there a way to configure the QB64 IDE so CTRL+F is find and not CTRL+F3? I am used to the newer standard Microsoft shortcuts and CTRL+F is in muscle memory at this point.
2. Can Visual Studio be set up to be the QB64 IDE or am I stuck with the standard DOS style editor? I can live with that, but figured I'd ask.
A little about me: TLDR version = I started programming in BASIC on 8-bit computers and am happy to find BASIC is alive and well for modern PCs.
A little about me: Long version = I started programming BASIC on a TRS-80 Model 1/3 and TI99/4A in the early 80s, my main inspiration being Atari and arcade games.
I graduated to Commodore 64 for most of the decade, making a bunch of games in BASIC / compiled BASIC / and some 8-bit assembly.
Next I toyed with Pascal on Apple II and early Macs (enjoyable), and some C in school (painful!).
After moving to Windows based PCs (more affordable color computer than Mac!) I briefly played with QuickBasic 4.5 in the mid 90s, before moving to Visual Basic 5 & 6 and beyond.
I did some VB.NET and even C# but they lost me sometime after .NET framework 2.0, especially with the heavy OO (interfaces! enterprise architecture! layered design! MVC! Yuck!) and all the constant changes to the language.
I've been doing JavaScript since the 90s, but a lot of that stuff now uses programming methods that make my head hurt (like closures and crazy OO) and I mainly want to write programs for Windows desktop not a browser. Making a game in JavaScript and HTML5 is just painful, compared to the simplicity I am looking for.
My programming language of choice for day to day productivity is MS VBA (Excel, Word) and some vbscript. VBA is simple enough yet very capable, but for video games it's not ideal because a lot of people don't have MS Office! And alas VBScript does not support any kind of graphics and MS has not evolved it.
I've played with Python a little but I really just prefer BASIC (VBA is my favorite).
Somewhat recently I wanted to go back and finish some of the video game ideas I've come up with over the years, mainly Atari 2600 and 8-bit style games, and tried writing some stuff in the C64 emulator. It was pretty painful, I can't believe I got by with that for so many years! I found some tools to write C64 code on the PC, but it was too complicated. I even wrote a working 6502 assembler and BASIC editor in Excel, but having to transfer stuff to a disk image every time I wanted to run something was unwieldly, as was the workings of the C64 itself.
I just want to write simple games in an easy language that has an active community and isn't liable to change too soon, and is compatible with Windows and hopefully more than just that one platform.
Python supposedly fits those requirements, but I just find installing it and setting up the pygame library and the language itself too alien and unwieldly. And maybe I'm just too set in my ways, I just hate the syntax and can't seem to write code that's "pythonic" enough!
QuickBasic has a lot of the features I like best about Visual Basic, and with QB64 it works with not just Windows but Linux and Mac, which is a huge plus. So I'm excited to have found this language and community!
Thanks everyone!
