Defold IDE improvements

Feature requests
#1

As I spend more time Defolding there are a few things about the IDE that I find a bit cumbersome. The central editing pane is too small when doing any serious script editing. Having to grab and resize the peripheral panes is a pain. It would be so much nicer to have little shrink/expand buttons as you find in so many IDE to quickly slide those pesky perhipheral panels in/out quickly. I mean something like this

https://ibb.co/zbsT24t

I personally have never been a great fan of drag & drop/point n click UI design - nice for newbies but it soon starts hitting your productivity. I have taken to editing the various *.gui, *.go etc files directly in VSCode. Fortunately, the Defold IDE detects file timestamp changes and reloads the changed files automatically. It would be nice if this could be done in the editor itself - I seem to recall that the likes of Silverlight and Delphi had this capability.

I may be wrong on this but the Undo capabilities are well below what is offered by most IDEs - VSCode for instance - or even by Notepad++: both let me Ctrl + Z away almost ad infinitum.

Finally - not really an IDE issue - it would be nice if the tutorials were to mention somewhere right up front that the X/Y position attributes of GUI objects refer to their centroids. It doesn’t take long to figure this out but it would be nicer to simply be told so.

#2

panels

You can find the shortcuts for hiding the panels in the View menu. E.g. F6 to hide the assets pane.

undo

We don’t keep the undo “per document” but “per project”, in order to make sure all resources are connected properly, and we can update the dependency tree accordingly.

When something alters the files outside of the editor, we can no longer guarantee this undo order, and thus we reset the undo history to that point.

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#3

@Mathias_Westerdahl

I understand that you have to make sure the resources are properly connected… But it is undeniable that having UNDO acting on a file other than the one selected in the editor creates confusion… I simply don’t use UNDO anymore except when I am sure that I have edited a single text file.

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#4

We understand this, but it’s unfortunately not an easy task to go back to a “per file” undo. So it’s still in the wish list, but we have no ETA for it.

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#5

It would help if the editor at least jumped to the file/line that gets undoed. It always makes me paranoid that I maybe undid a change somewhere without knowing.

5 Likes
#6

Really, really true! +1 for this! Same paranoid feeling for me… :slight_smile:

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#7

Ooohhhhhh…did not know that. Now it all makes sense! I learned to not rely on undo since I couldn’t figure out when it would work or not. I use an external text editor, so I guess the entire history gets cleared all the time.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seems like a very close choice whether managing resource dependencies is worth losing reliable undo history for.

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