Customize Delphi IDE and Improve Speed

29 May, 2007 (12:00) | Delphi, Developer

Borland Developer Studio (BDS), CodeGear Developer Studio (CDS), Embarcadero RAD studo:
Help tutorial guide on how to customize and improve speed of the Delphi 4, 5, 6, 7, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and C++ Builder IDE

Delphi 2005 upgrades and updates – official and unofficial

Official updates
- Delphi 2005 service pack 3 also called SP3. Released: 2005/06/10.
Unofficial updates
- Remember to backup all the files you replace!
- Only apply these patches after all official updates, and only if newer!

2005 September rollup of unofficial updates provided by Allen Bauer – also referred to as “unofficial SP4″. The file you need to download is called d2005_update.zip, and isavailable from Code Central with item id 23618.

FastMM is an open source memory manager. When you have downloaded and extracted the newest version, refer to the documention for further instructions. I installed FastMM by replacing the file “BorlandMM.dll” in the Delphi bin directory with “BorlandMM.dll” found in “FastMM\Replacement BorlndMM DLL\Precompiled\for Delphi IDE\Performance\”.

Delphi 2006 upgrades and updates – official and unofficial

Official updates
- Delphi 2006 update #1. Includes C and C++ Builder personality. Released: 2005/12/12.
- Delphi 2006 update #2. Released: 2006/04/17.
- Delphi 2006 hotfix #1 to #6. Released: 2006/06/01.

3rd party tools – improve startup speed and functionality

JED Software
- Delphi Configuration Manager – select the modules you want Delphi to load at startup.
- JED QualityCentral Client – tool for reporting bugs.
Miscellaneous
- Delphi help for BDS expert plugin – Integrate Delphi 6 / 7 help into Delphi 2005 / 2006.
- DelphiSpeedUp IDE plugin – Improves load time and speed of the Delphi 2006 IDE.

3rd party code libraries – improve code speed and time to market

Fastcode project.
FastMM.
Project Jedi.

Keyboard shortcuts – quick and useful

“SHIFT + CTRL + K + O” enables/disables code folding.
“Ctrl + Alt + P” focuses tool palette.

Floating form designer – docked or undocked

“Tools – Options – Environment Options – Delphi Options – VCL Designer – Embedded designer”.

Miscellaneous interesting settings – improve speed and minimize delays

“Tools – Options – Environment Options – Editor Options – Code Insight – Error Insight”.

IDE editor highlight color themes – missing the non-altered original twilight theme

In Delphi 2005 the original Delphi twilight theme with white text on black background disappeared from selectable themes.
However, it is possible to export the relevant parts of Delphi 6 Twilight theme settings from Windows registry.
After cleaning the data, the result is original-twilight-editor-highlight.reg.txt.
Note: This file is provided as is. Make sure to view it. Remove the .txt extension to run it.

IDE flickering – switching between code and form designer
To minimize flicker in Delphi 2005 (and possibly later) edition use docked Structure + Tool Palette + Object Inspector + Project Manager + Data Explorer together into the same floating window. Use keyboard shortcuts to switch between. Doing so means that only one of the above tool windows are visible at any given time. This, in my experience at least, minimizes the flicker experienced when switching between form and code.

This article was first created 2005-10-05 (yyyy/mm/dd) by Thomas Schulz and continues to be updated now and then