Editing smali code used to be a pain. Even for the more experienced developers amongst us, smali always was nothing you
really enjoyed. If you knew what you are doing you usually got the job done, but it never was really fun to work with smali.
This time is over now. With VTS you will love to work with smali (as long as you like coding in general)
All these basic development workflow steps which used to be not available are now here:
- Syntax highlightning
- Listing fields
- Listing methods
- Jumping along gotos
- Jumping to methods
- …
Open this post to continue reading...These features might sounds not so important, but if you ever worked with smali, you know how bad their absence really is.
So lets have a closer look at the first feature:
syntax highlighting.
For those that are unaware, syntax highlighting basically means that different parts of the code are colored in different ways.
Here are two pictures, showing the difference between stock code and highlighted code:
As you can see, the highlighted code is much easier to read, especially if there is not only a short piece of code but more than 3.000 lines of smali.
VTS comes with an inbuilt set of highlightning rules, however the user can easily create his own version if needed.
Stay tuned for the next post to get an insight in the listing of fields and methods, another very useful smali feature in VTS.