Unfortunately, it often takes a while to get the experience that tells you whether a project is one you can finish or not--many people just bite off more than they can chew and burn out. If you're relatively new to programming, just start out with very simple projects, or a project that is modular so you can work on pieces as you learn. I guess here's some other tips:
1. Only start a project you actually think you can get done
2. Only start a project you are passionate about
3. Only start a project if you have time to work on it
4. Don't announce your project until you have something worthwhile written. This will keep you motivated toward making something cool ("I don't want to post until I've made a demo, so I need to make the demo") and prevent some criticisms that can happen if it's still a super rough design etc. This also prevents there from being a bunch of dead projects. I've started plenty that went nowhere but didn't announce them.
5. Listen to other people, but don't let what they say matter too much. When I started TokenIDE, lots of people said "this already exists blah blah blah", but I kept power through because I knew I would be adding features that don't yet exist.
5.5. If you're starting a project that has all sorts of other competing projects, make sure you have neat new functionality, or no one will want to switch.
6. If you're stuck on something in the project, feel free to work on another side project or something. Taking your mind off of the project will help clear your palette, and you'll go in refreshed. You don't want to burn out.

That's what I tend to do. Especially the side projects. I have a big project I've been working on for two years, but I've released other stuff as well so that I don't get sick of it.

So, this contest has inspired me to make a bot I've been meaning to make for quite some time: MineBot! It plays minesweeper. It's up right now (though keep in mind as I work on it it will go down). You can play through DCC:
/dcc chat MineBot
The gameplay should be pretty straight forward, you just tell it which row and column you want to "click" on, and it goes from there. I'm thinking of adding other games as well. I'm also going to make it so it can hopefully do private messaging as well.

Also: It's only on EFnet right now.

|~
To find tokens, it's useful to search the Tokens.xml file for what you need, and you might find it. For example, searching for "~" shows up:
<Token byte="$CF" string="|~" />And while those can sometimes be misleading, a quick tokenization and throwing it on an emulator can show that it's the right token. And, of course, if you want to change it to just a tilde, you certainly can, but you'll want to update the other entry as well:
<Token byte="$B0" string="~">
<Alt string="|-" />
<Alt string="⁻" />
</Token>
In this case, though, I choose ~ for negative because I assume in general there will be many more negatives that tildes.

I hope it's not too soon for a double post--I've added some much-asked-for functionality.

Due to some rather incessant nagging on tifreak's part (thank you, Daniel ), I have added the functionality to count blocks, such as While/End etc. Here's an example:

You can specify any number of groups. It's under Tools > Block Counts.
Limitations:
- It currently doesn't handle "Else" gracefully. It just treats it as another token. Ideally it would unindent the "else" line and indent the following line.

- The indentation is automatic, so if you're doing this with Axe and have included your own indentation, it'll extra indent it.
- The AxeTokens.xml file doesn't have any groups defined, so check out Tokens.xml and see how it's doing it if you want to add them to it. I don't know if Axe does it the same way or what.
- Eventually this will be integrated into the main editor so that you don't have to go to a tool to use it. For now, though, it's separate.

Technical details:
There are two new tags that you'll use in the XML:
- indentGroup - String - Which group this token belongs in.
- indentGroupTerminator - Boolean - If it's a terminator.

For example, here's what the Tokens.xml looks like:
<Token byte="$CE" string="If " />
<Token byte="$CF" string="Then" indentGroup="End Group" />
<Token byte="$D0" string="Else" />
<Token byte="$D1" string="While " indentGroup="End Group" />
<Token byte="$D2" string="Repeat " indentGroup="End Group" />
<Token byte="$D3" string="For(" indentGroup="End Group" />
<Token byte="$D4" string="End" indentGroup="End Group" indentGroupTerminator="true" />
I hope that makes sense!

Download in the normal spot:
http://merthsoft.com/Tokens.zip

I have another feature request and two other things to report (not bugs, more me having problems)
And I excuse myself in advance for my poor sentences and explanations but I am French and I am not sure that you understand the bad English I use.

Your English is fine, don't worry!

- The feature I'd like to see added is to display the number of selected characters. It is useful for example when moving sprites who don't have individual square brackets.

I can see why that would be useful, so I added it. Now when you highlight a section, it tells you how many characters, tokens, and bytes it takes up:

- I noticed that the IDE changes the indentation of a line to make it the same as the previous line. Keeping the indentation of the previous line when creating a new line is very useful, but automatically changing the indentation of an existing line when it is edited is annoying in my opinion.

That is annoying, I didn't even know it did that. I've changed auto-indent off entirely until I can invest some more time into figuring out what's going on there.

- Also, the cursor seems to always blink at the same frequency, while a true text editor cursor sees its cycle changed when it is moved. I mean that when I press a key, the cursor should appear, whatever was its state right before the click. Whereas in your prog, when I press a key, it only moves the cursor but doesn't set the cursor's state as black.
(Not sure if you understood what I mean so when answering me, in the textbox, keep the down key pressed, you'll see that it never blinks until you release the key. Now, do that in TokenIDE, you see that it continues blinking, and when it disappears, it continues moving down but you don't see where it is).

This has been fixed. Download in the normal place:
http://merthsoft.com/Tokens.zip

Thanks to some help from Deep Though, I've fixed (once again) how saving is handled. Note that any programs you had previously compiled with tokens may now have those extra bytes at the end, but cleaning and rebuilding should fix it. Download at the normal place:
http://merthsoft.com/Tokens.zip

Seems I actually didn't updated. I've uploaded a new version that should have this and the saving issue fixed. If it's still not working, please let me know.