haxegon
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haxegon
Make a dedicated Haxegon IDE
So the code editor approach for Haxe on macs really hasn't improved in the past year, sadly. All the options out there are too techy, too commandliney, too package-managery.
The Kha project have made a forked version of Visual Code Studio, which looks great. But actually, the thing that really needs to exist for Haxegon is way simpler than that. A notepad-like thing with code completion and big build button would do the job just fine.
So why not just make an IDE from scratch?
(because it would take forever. but still, creating an issue and thinking about it)
(I'm more than half serious about this. THE BIGGEST problem with trying to learn to program in 2016 is just how obtuse and insidery programming tools and their setup have become. Even Haxedevelop has it's problems - requiring separate installation of Java dependencies, etc. I dream of something like BlitzBasic - a single installer.exe that gets you set up and ready to go.)
Vague thoughts about what it would entail:
Encapsulation: I don't know if it's possible to have a standalone version of haxe/haxelib, or if it needs to be installed somewhere - need to investigate that. Ideally, the IDE would be set up to use particular stable version of the Haxegon library, the Starling and OpenFL dependencies, and the Haxe toolkit. The ideal version of the project would keep all this stuff in the background and invisible to the user. The user should only need to know about and understand the Haxegon layer.
Targets: Should be easily selectable from a dropdown list beside the build button. The IDE should come with a flash player that it uses and runs itself. The HTML5 target could ideally run in the IDE if the IDE is made in something like appjs.
Should mobile targets ever become a thing for Haxegon in the future, then it's not clear how they'd work.
Console: Seems to be fairly easy to capture traces at run time - am already doing it here: https://github.com/TerryCavanagh/terrycompile
Autocomplete: The important thing to autocomplete library functions, which should be easy enough. Autocompletion for user variables would be nice, but definitely not essential.
Debugging: Beginners don't care about debugging - they just want to know what line their program crashes on, and to be able to capture traces.
Investigate if codemirror will work as a standalone thing - if so, a lot of stuff could just be cribbed from Zeedonk!
Monkey did this, and it looks great! http://www.monkey-x.com/Monkey/ted.php
standalone version of zeedonk? it'd br possible to wrap it (I'm good at wrapping things for standalone). Check out electron http://electron.atom.io (used for visual studio code and coda, iirc)
On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 1:35 PM, Terry Cavanagh [email protected] wrote:
Monkey did this, and it looks great! http://www.monkey-x.com/ Monkey/ted.php
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https://medium.com/@rcwestlake/building-a-desktop-app-with-electron-codemirror-93b681237e60
I really need to get around to trying that, haha.
vscode support is definitely something I want to figure out very soon. HaxeDevelop has gotten a bit crashy, and it being windows only is a big problem. I'm gonna look into this properly next week.
So the case for a dedicated Haxegon IDE is: one download, and it just works. No matter how nice vscode has gotten, it's always going to involve installing plugins and so on. But yeah, maybe that's not so terrible, really.