I don’t think that its a matter of “defending the current IDE”
but more “this is the terrain upon which we find ourselves deployed”.
Saying the VS Code has this feature or that feature, or that the Xojo IDE lacks this or that… is a moot point.
It is what it is, and you (and me, and everyone else) has a few choices.
submit feedback requests, and hope that some of you “wishes” come true in some future version of IDE
take it as it is, in all its glory (or lack thereof)
find (or develop) and alternative (or export/import) that allows VS editor today
But I’m sure that Xojo has more things on their plate, than creating a whole new paradighm right now
Have submitted feedback, also providing feedback in this thread.
Don’t love the take its as is argument. I would never tell my clients to just “take it as it is”. If I’m not meeting feature parity with competitive software they’ll pick other options. That’s not a good strategy for any business.
I don’t have time. Again I wouldn’t expect my clients to develop alternatives to support my software’s missing features. I do and however encourage integrations when the result is a improved solution. I don’t however expect them to develop those partnerships and integrations but do listen to their feedback.
Sounds like there’s not a lot of support for this idea so i’m inclined to let it go. Too bad.
And that is precisely the point of creating feedback cases that people can vote on. The voting mechanism seems much more crucial to Xojo’s decision on how to prioritize limited resources than forum threads. And that is how it seems to me it should be. In a perfect world with unlimited resources, Xojo may be able to accommodate many things.
By the same token, have you already implemented everything your clients have mentioned (without raising prices)?
Maybe you can make feature requests for what you think are missing features in the Xojo IDE compared to other IDE’s through the feedback app and post them here. Then people can add their points to your requests and Xojo can see if there is demand among the developers for these requests. We’ve had some success with doing it that way.
[quote=388032:@Neil Burkholder]I’m not sure what you call success? <https://xojo.com/issue/30> is ranked number 5 and is 18 years old. I wouldn’t really call that success.
Something simple like <https://xojo.com/issue/27328> that is found in almost any text editor,was finally implemented after nearly five years.
It appears that enhancements to the IDE are not very high on Xojo’s priority list…[/quote]
Feature wise, the IDE seems stuck in the 1990’s. I’m into my 12th year of using RB & Xojo and I have yet to see any real improvements to code management or debugging. In some areas the product has actually went backwards rather than forwards.
I imagine anybody coming to Xojo from another system must be shell shocked at the lack of features that are pretty much standard elsewhere.
It is now June 2020, and I apologize for reviving this 2-year-old thread, but it is of great interest to me as a brand new Xojo user.
I’ve only been using Xojo for two weeks, and so far I am positively impressed with Xojo 19.3.1 including the IDE.
I have a fairly fast Mac, 2019 iMac-27 512GB SSD, 3.6Ghz i9 CPU, 40GB RAM, and I have not experienced any of the slowness you guys reported back in 2018.
I do agree that the Xojo Code Editor is not nearly as good as Visual Studio Code (where I do a lot of JavaScript development).
But I do find Xojo IDE acceptable.
I am curious as to whether or not any of you guys have changed your opinions of the Xojo IDE with the latest version, 2019r3, with respect to doing Desktop app development on a Mac.
At the risk of poking the bear, but when I come back to the Xojo IDE after being in PHPStorm or VSCode, it frustrates the heck out of me! It is simple things like duplicate a line/block or delete a line quickly etc that just get me! I get re-used to it but the ability to use an external editor would be a huge +1 from me.
Visual Studio Code is opensource under MIT license (Free for comercial use).
Visual Studio IDE is free if gross sales is under one million dollars, and less than five team members, which makes free for most smaller companies that couldn’t afford the license.
[quote=492657:@Neil Burkholder]Visual Studio Code is opensource under MIT license (Free for comercial use).
Visual Studio IDE is free if gross sales is under one million dollars, and less than five team members, which makes free for most smaller companies that couldn’t afford the license.[/quote]
ok i removed my remark
i had read the license terms again and again.
It should be pretty easy to add Xojo language support if Xojo support command line compilation. I suppose you could even add an extension to do GUI design, although that would be a major project. Debugging would be another ‘can of worms’.
[quote=492563:@Jim Underwood]I am curious as to whether or not any of you guys have changed your opinions of the Xojo IDE with the latest version, 2019r3, with respect to doing Desktop app development on a Mac.
[/quote]
As a development environment, the design and workflow are mostly right. I was teaching after-school coding with local middle school students using Xojo and the new users were able to get up to speed very quickly. Unfortunately, these mostly excellent usability factors go out the window due to the performance issues that we see.
As a long term user (since 2004), the Xojo IDEs have all had serious performance issues of one type or another. Back in the REALbasic/REAL Studio days, the IDEs were very snappy and I would hold those up against almost any IDE in the developer world. Xojo is a very different situation. A number of old-timers are still using 2019r1.1 and 2018r3 because of the performance hits we’ve seen with 19r2, 19r2.1, 19r3, and 19r3.1. And, if you really want to face frustration, try using the Linux IDE - even on a monster system. The memory leaks (which have been verified for quite some time) cause it to take long 10s of seconds to type a simple line of text. Doing a mouse select can take 4-5 clicks before the cursor location is updating, and quitting causes the ever popular “the app is not responding” popup every time.
Those kind of text-handling features don’t bother me because if I really want them I can achieve the same using Keyboard Maestro and/or AppleScript. I assume a XojoScript could also be written to do this.
What I miss most from VSC is the autocompletion it provides. It works very well, very fast, quickly showing me a popup list of choices, including method/function parameters. Should I submit a Xojo Feedback for this, or is that just a waste of time?
Thanks for the feedback.
That is very sad. Surely the Xojo Devs must be aware of this. Why do they allow it to continue?
I hope those huge delays are only for the Linux version. So far, I have not seen any slowness in Xojo 2019r3.1 on macOS 10.14.6 (Mojave).
My experience with the Xojo IDE under Ubuntu Linux is that Xojo 2019r1.1 was nearly unusable. But Xojo 2019r3.1 is much better. Still not “snappy” but it no longer requires me to restart the IDE every twenty minutes of editing anymore.
You should consider requesting access to the Tester forum as I am sure your feedback would be greatly appreciated by the Xojo staff for Xojo beta release in preparation for final release of future versions.
