KIDE 9 Project / project management - still feels clumsy

Discussions
1

Hi Guys,

i was using komodo ide back in v5 days, and since then it seems that while code intelligence and some other things improved, the rest isn’t going in the right direction. I have tried v8 and the problem i have is like the UI has become incoherent.

For example, in v5 the whole enviroment was built (or at least that is my impression) around idea of editing a project. So we opened a project and the ide limited eg. file lists to the scope of this single project… so for example if i wanted to look for a file i just typed it in the project’s file filter and that’s it. No other distractions. Very convinient.

screencast.com/t/EDcLdjIb23

Then, version 8 introduced that not-so good file find window. That kept history, so when i was searching for something, what i get was ton of garbage from other projects and sometimes i just mistakenly opened a file from other project and edited it, because i was acustomed that the IDE will do filtering for me…

If no project is opened, keeping history might be in fact a good idea, but why showing history from outside of current project when a project is open?

Beside seeing the files as lines of text with icons instead of tree i think is less readable because group/dir can’t be seen easily anymore.

screencast.com/t/lCMpjSx1

So im using the v5 but it’s getting old, hoping that project panel will get fixed. Now, in the v9 the things got better, mainly because its UI feels nicer. But still it seems a bit like some separated components living their own life (the UI is incoherent across the IDE) and the project management still doesn’t feel as good as in v5.

Good thing is that finally that horrible history feature is gone from file open and it got improved (or at least i don’t have history yet) :slight_smile: Still would be good to bring back that old filter feature i think…

For example this:
screencast.com/t/7HratpbiSG3P
When im in project editing mode i really don’t want to see content of whole drive or sub-dirs. Standard file explorer window is much more convinient to open files from outside of a project than this tab anyway… Is it possible to bring back that file filter instead?

I checked the forums to see if im missing something but people are asking to bring this feature back since version 6 (eg. here http://community.activestate.com/forum/filter-file-list-places) … can you bring it back in 9? That was IMO the key feature of the enviroment, at least for me it’s still more convinient to use v5 dated back to 2008…

2

The Fast Open feature of Komodo (what you refer to as “that not-so good file find window”) should be able to do what you want, though you will need to tweak the preferences that control’s what it searches.

In the Fast Open preferences, you can enable/disable things like history, working directories, etc…

So please try that, and let us know if that works better.

3

Hi Todd, thanks for the reply. Yes, already tried this… basically even when configured (i go rid of most things that i didn’t want to search for, and eg. duplicated files)… it’s hard to find things on this list… as im working with projects that have many files / dirs, so using filter i can just quickly locate things by directory, because i know they should be eg. on top of the tree not in some random spot of string-like list.

Beside it probably should just search for what’s in the project panel anyway… im not saying it’s a bad feature, it’s just much less convinient that it was before, and seems under-developed.

When you look at the v5 panel, everything is there… open/new project/file, filtering, sorting, and it has eg. same scrollbars that the rest of the ide. For v8 it feels like a huge step backwards, most of functionality from this part of the IDE is gone and it no longer “feels” like a part of it…

Would you consider bringing this back? Shouldn’t be too hard, probably it’d be some work but filtering functionality is already there (in Manage Views), so it seems it’d just be needed to add an interface to functionality that’s already present. It doesn’t matter that it’s kind of slow in v5… it’s still much faster than going through “flat” list that updates quickly.

4

I don’t think we will bring back the filesystem tree filter (from the dev team perspective) - the fast open dialog (and soon to be Commando in Komodo 9) have become the search tools that we will continue to focus upon - I personally like the fast open dialog a lot more (it’s more powerful, allows fuzzy matching, doesn’t require the Places pane to be open and is extremely fast to use).

I do understand that this is subjective, and I’d recommend anyone interested in such a search feature to create a Komodo add-on (perhaps that fuzzy search Tito was talking about) to fill that gap.

As for a work estimate - I’d imagine it would take around a weeks work (for myself) to implement, so it’s not something simple (as that code has changed a lot since Komodo 5 code).

Cheers,
Todd