Delphi 10.3 Rio
In November 2018, the first release of Delphi 10.3 Rio was made available. Besides improvements in themes, cleaner lines, aligned controls, better tab-readability, and clearer window focus changes, there were no major changes to the IDE in any of the three releases of Delphi 10.3 Rio. That's not to say this was not a significant version, as there were several language and library features added, which we will cover later.
One nice improvement can be seen in the New Items list (from the menu, go to File | New | Other). It changed to present a scrollable list of items with full descriptions and larger icons and titles giving more information about what you're about to create. Some items are now in multiple categories, such as the FireMonkey Metro UI application, which is in both the Multi-Device and the Windows categories. These are great aids in helping you find the item you want.
GetIt Package Manager was improved in a similar fashion to show items in a scrollable list. Other aspects of its interface were improved as well:
Figure 1.6 – Delphi 10.3 Rio's improved New Items list
The categories in both the general and project options have been reworked, with some new ones introduced and others moved around. For general IDE options, this has shortened the list, but more importantly, the full list of categories is no longer fully expanded, making it much more manageable. One big change to the recategorization is that the Delphi section (with library paths and Type Library options) has been pulled out of Environment and is now under its own Language category (which actually makes much more sense).
Many Delphi users have included Andreas Hausladen's IDE Fix Pack as part of their Delphi install routines over the years. Some of those fixes are now part of Delphi 10.3 Rio.
Finally, some speed enhancements have been made, including loading forms with LiveBindings.
There were a couple of nice IDE plugins added to GetIt Package Manager that should be mentioned: Bookmarks and Navigator. Both of these were acquired by Embarcadero from Parnassus.
Bookmarks extends Delphi's bookmark stacks feature introduced in 10.1 Berlin with unlimited temporary bookmarks and much more convenient hotkeys (F2 to set, and Esc to pop back and remove), along with a dockable window to list them within context.
Navigator provides a hotkey (Ctrl + G) that pops up a list of quick places you might need to jump in your code, such as the interface Uses section or the declaration for a field. With a few keys of incremental search or a couple of down arrows, you can hit Enter to go there immediately, then after you're done and want to get back to where you were, simply hit Esc! It's a beautiful marriage with the Bookmarks feature. But wait, there's more! Additionally (and optionally), Navigator also provides a resizable mini-map of your code on the right-hand side of the code editor that not only gives you a glimpse of where you are in the current unit but also allows you to click and drag to view a different portion of the unit without changing your current cursor position.
NOTE
One important note before we move on to the latest version of Delphi is that the Integrated Translation tools will no longer be improved and developers are warned to migrate to a different set of translation tools if they are being used.
