Getting Started with Lazarus IDE: Get to grips with the basics of programming, debugging, creating, and documenting projects with the Lazarus IDE

The first tab of the Object Inspector window is the Properties tab. The Properties tab contains the published properties of the graphical component elements contained in a form, such as Name, Position, and Visible. Clicking on a component on the form or selecting it in the Component Tree window makes its properties accessible in the Properties tab. Right-clicking on the Properties tab displays a pop-up menu with the Show Hints, Show Components Tree, and Options entries.

When the developer places his mouse cursor over the property of the active component, such as Align, having Show Hints enabled will display a pop-up message with help concerning that property. The Options entry opens the IDE Options dialog, displaying the Environment options tree with the Object Inspector branch selected. Primarily, these options are just for setting the look of the Object Inspector branch with options for setting colors or showing or not showing certain elements of the Object Inspector...

The Component Tree window is located in the top window of the Object Tree dialog and can be made visible or hidden by checking or unchecking the Show Component Tree entry on any of the pop-up menus that are accessed by right-clicking on the Object Inspector dialog. The components of the application are shown in a parent-child relationship on a tree diagram. Right-clicking on the window gives you access to a pop-up menu that allows you to copy, cut, paste, and delete the selected component. Copying will create a new component when pasted. You can cut and paste a component into and out of different container type components such as TPanel. There is also a menu entry titled Z-order that allows you to adjust what layer of the form the component is anchored to. This is only effective for container components, such as TPanel.

The Source Editor window contains a tab for each opened unit's source code. The Source Editor features include code highlighting, code completion, and refactoring. The Source Editor options can be accessed by right-clicking on the window and selecting the Options entry in the pop-up menu. Options such as code folding, code color highlighting, and the delay of displaying the code hints and completion boxes are displayed. The pop-up menu also contains entries to change file settings, such as displaying the code line numbers, and code highlighting colors, and debug settings, such as toggling of breakpoints, evaluation, and modification of expressions. We will cover many of these options in more detail in Chapter 3, Creating a Hello World Program.

Main menu, quick icons, and the LCL Palette window

The main menu, quick icons, and the LCL Palette window are at the top-most part of the Lazarus IDE window. Quick icons is the Lazarus terminology for the icons located to the...

In this chapter we learned about the different parts of Lazarus. The Main Menu area located in the top-most window, by default, contains various submenus, such as the Run menu, which contains entries for compiling, running, and debugging an application, and the Project menu, from which new projects can be created. Options such as the application title and icon can be set using the Projects Options entry.

The Source Editor window includes features such as code highlighting, code completion, refactoring, and code folding.

The Object Inspector window allows access to the published properties and events of a graphical component that has been added to a form.

The Component Tree window, which is located in the top window of the Object Inspector window, shows the components of a form in a parent-child relationship. Components can be added or edited using Component Tree.

Finally, we learned about the LCL Palette, which has multiple tabs, such as SQLdb, Common Controls, and Misc, that contain...