improvements to codea editor

Hey @Simeon, @John,

I’m on iPad Pro 12.9", the latest Codea Beta and iOS11 - but I had these issues under iOS10 too

  • when selecting text with SHIFT+ArrowKeys, the editor scrolls randomly to different positions further down or to the end of the file
  • ALT+ArrowKeys stopped working, which I need a lot while jumping through code or selecting text, etc.
  • ‘find & replace’ until today never worked correctly for me. Lately it deleted portions of my code while replacing string in random places. I never use this functionality anymore because I fear data loss.

I think the editor generally needs some more love. It got worse and worse with each release after the rewrite of Codea a few releases back. It needs to be improved in all areas:

  • edit two files in split screen
  • new view for file management (scrolling 20x tabs is nightmare)
  • more stability! (code disappears when too many tabs created; find&replace destroy code randomly; etc.)
  • ability to edit code of ‘imported projects’ in place
  • ability to edit shaders in place
  • regex expressions support for find & replace
  • ‘find’ should also search imported projects (sometimes you need to know if you have certain functionality somewhere)
  • ‘goto’ command for jumping to line numbers, file names, function names and class names

If I can help you somehow, just let me know.

Codea is very powerful but its management tools are pretty limited. I would love to see an editor overhaul because I think this limits people writing serious software with Codea.

thank you

Thank you @se24vad

Alt+arrow keys appears to stop working after using shift+arrows to select. Need to look into what is going on here. iOS 11 seems to be doing a lot of annoying … interesting things to the text system.

I’ve modified Find & Replace a bit in the latest store release (not the 2.5 beta, that will be updated soon to match). But I agree that it still needs more work.

I love your editor suggestions. I’ve been thinking about many of the same things. Maybe we can implement them one at a time.

@Simeon I agree

If you’d like to have some help regarding design proposals (visual art of how things might look and work), I would happily contribute a few suggestions :wink: