My previous project was stuck using the 2014 IDE and I’ve recently jumped to 2018 R1 - a 4 year jump. I did light testing on versions in between, but I suspect I may have missed some improvements. I have some questions, and/or may be seeing some bugs…
Show Types and Show Default Values:
What does Preferences/ Navigator / Show default Values and Types in Navigator do? I’ve toggled both settings, and I’m not sure what I’m seeing. It looks like they control whether the navigator pane shows the parameters in methods/function names? However, it seems inconsistent: e.g. for an overloaded method they are always shown regardless of the setting. Does this only affect the display of non-overloaded methods? (There also appears to be an issue where it doesn’t refresh the current Tab after changing settings)
Tab behavior / Locking / Project hierarchy
If I double-click a project item (such as a Class named FooBar) it opens in a new tab, which is Locked. At that point there’s no way to go Up in the project hierarchy (e.g. to see what FooBar’s parent Folder is). If I unlock the tab, then FooBar has a popup menu, but it only shows the root. E.g. instead of seeing Root/AAA/BBB/CCC/Foobar, the popup menu only shows “Root”. Selecting it jumps to the root of my project, with the FooBar class visible (e.g. folders AAA/BBB/CCC are expanded) but Foobar is not selected. I know the IDE had a lot of trouble with tab locking. Is this working “as designed” or still buggy?
Library and Inspector as Palettes
This looks interesting- does anyone find this a useful feature? (NB there appears to be a visual bug <https://xojo.com/issue/51993> )
Debugger and Overloaded Methods
When clicking the Edit icon (pencil) in the debugger while in an overloaded method, it frequently jumps to the wrong overloaded method. This is an old bug, and I’m surprised it’s not fixed. Is it just me?
Editor Font
Any recommendations? I’m thinking perhaps Consolas might be good (I’m on macOS)
[quote=383844:@Michael Diehr]Tab behavior / Locking / Project hierarchy[/b]
If I double-click a project item (such as a Class named FooBar) it opens in a new tab, which is Locked. At that point there’s no way to go Up in the project hierarchy (e.g. to see what FooBar’s parent Folder is). If I unlock the tab, then FooBar has a popup menu, but it only shows the root. E.g. instead of seeing Root/AAA/BBB/CCC/Foobar, the popup menu only shows “Root”. Selecting it jumps to the root of my project, with the FooBar class visible (e.g. folders AAA/BBB/CCC are expanded) but Foobar is not selected. I know the IDE had a lot of trouble with tab locking. Is this working “as designed” or still buggy?[/quote]
The whole tabbing scheme is so ill-conceived, unintuitive and confusing that I suspect it’s not possible to determine what the design intent was or if it’s working “as designed”. I wish they’d go back to the way tabs were handled in RS, with an immutable “Project” tab leftmost.
[quote=383897:@shao sean]There was talk about a re-designed IDE a couple years ago, but it has probably taken a back seat to all the other things they’re working on…
https://www.bkeeneybriefs.com/2016/10/xdc-news-ide-redesign-coming/[/quote]
Yeah, hoping to hear more about that this week. I know one of the goals was to convert the Navigator to listbox rather than a ContainerControl. I don’t think that transition has happened yet but given some of the recent additions to listbox I’d suspect that some of them are for that project.
Yeah, you’re seeing all the things we all complained about 4 years ago. We wasted many hours of time trying to talk them out of some of this but by then it was too late. The Inspector is far less useful than the Properties list but it’s prettier. The Navigator is a PITA with large projects and until recently was schizoid with a severe case of bipolar disorder and shows a lot less information when you want more and shows too much when you want less. But it’s prettier.
And unfortunately, when I bet on not met the goals, the more I win.