How can I disable Castalia in XE8?

Question

Suppose that I wish to disable the newly integrated Castalia that is introduced in XE8. How do I go about doing that in a clean way? I cannot see anything on the Castalia menu that allows me to disable it by setting one single option.

Reasons why one might wish to disable Castalia include:

• How can I configure the new Delphi XE8 Editor begin-end visual cues?
• It interacts poorly with the Bookmarks plugin's animations.
• Castalia has been known to render the IDE unstable.

Distress

As I understand it, you can use /NOCASTALIA when launching the IDE. – Ensconce

Disable the package in the registry danielwolf.eu/blog/2015/… (german link) – Rappel

Another related issue: https://mcmap.net/q/501967/-delphi-xe8-and-fatal-error-f2039 – Coulson

Castalia was always unstable (and also slowing down the IDE or consuming lots of CPU) – Quiver

Answer 1

You have 2 options

1) modify the shortcut to the Delphi (RAD Studio) IDE, adding the parameter /NOCASTALIA

2) disable the castalia expert from the registry

Go the the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\16.0\Known IDE Packages\Delphi key and then place a underscore _ in front of the description of the Castalia package, in that way the package is not loaded.

Caucasia

I'm curious about 2nd method. Do you have any reference on it? – Defective

Is just a old method to disable packages aplied on this case to Castalia, I read this on a Delphi book a long time ago. Anyway here you have a reference (bobswart.nl/weblog/Blog.aspx?RootId=5:1921) – Caucasia

Brilliant, thanks! I never knew about this one (did move values to "Disabled IDE Packages" key) – Defective

Method 2 is used also by Delphi to mark components as not usable anymore. If you have installed some components and then disappear from palette, have a look in that part of registry to check if it is mentioned there. Have seen cases where reinstalling has not functioned until moving the registration to the part of registry where active components are registered. – Mandel

I just tried to do this, but there is no entry here for Castalia. Had to use the other method instead. {EDIT} Actually I just found it at the prior Key, not in the Delphi key. – Coulson

In its infinite wisdom EMBD has decided Castalia should be part of XE 10.1 and both the command line option (ignored) and registry entry (gone) do not provide a solution. So I am left with a crashing IDE again.. Any other suggestions how to get rid of this Castalia? – Tempera

Neither solution works in Delphi 10 Seattle. Adding the switch to the shortcut does nothing, and this entry doesn't exist in the registry, neither in the Known IDE Packages node or the Delphi node. – Coulson

@JerryDodge I think you can disable some parts of castalia by prefixing two BPLs with an underscore: codequerydelphi230.bpl and codequeryide230.bpl. This disables the new navigation bar in the code view, but does not hide it. However, I noticed only minimal performance benefit (if any) after disabling this packages. – Illtempered

for Delphi 10 and 10.1 the Castalia is no longer a seperate menu, so it would be hard to disable it. but I found that install DDevExtensions and IDE Fix Pack helped a lot with speed and stablity. andy.jgknet.de/blog/ide-tools/ddevextensions – Sherer