Introduction

Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code) is a free source code editor for Windows. One of the features of the product is that people can write “Extensions” to allow it to support different programming languages. Extensions have been written Yaskawa Motoman “.jbi” robot jobs. This means you can download robot jobs to a PC and use an editor that provides a lot of helpful features to understand the code and make modifications.

This is an alternative to the popular Motoman Notepad++ custom extension that was developed some time ago but is no longer maintained.

This document will provide information on how to install VS Code, add the extension to support .jbi files and describe some of the benefits of this approach.

Additional Background on VS Code

From the Wikipedia Article: “Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded version control with Git. Users can change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add functionality.

In the Stack Overflow 2023 Developer Survey, Visual Studio Code was ranked the most popular developer environment tool among 86,544 respondents, with 73.71% reporting that they use it.

Downloading and Installing VS Code

The website that has the download files and instructions is: https://code.visualstudio.com/

The Extensions for VS Code are at: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/VSCode

On this Extensions page, I did a search using the word “Yaskawa”, which returned these results:

You can see there are a couple of options for editing INFORM jobs and there are extensions available for YML. I am including these details for searching for extensions so you can find new ones as they are developed and try alternatives to the one we will use below. This is not an endorsement or criticism of any other approach.

I am going to install the middle option “Yaskawa Inform” by tshikina. It supports syntax highlighting, code folding and can be used with  other inform related files like VAR.DAT, ALL.PRM, and etc. Click on “Install”. (Assuming you have already installed VS CODE) that will prompt you to open VS Code and install the extension. Click Install again.

You will see examples of the syntax highlighting (color coding of keywords) and Code Completion features on the web page. Code Completion allows you to enter commands or entire sections of code just by typing the first letter of a command.

These are repeated below.

At this point, you are ready to go! You can start a new .jbi file and enter code from scratch. This can be challenging, as incorrect syntax will not load back into the controller and error messages can be hard to decipher.

The better approach is to use VS Code with the Yaskawa extension to review and make minor updates to jobs downloaded from your controller.