Does anyone else find javascript/electron-based code editors confusing? I can never understand the organization/hierarchies of menus, buttons, windows, tabs. All my time is spent hunting through the interface. My kingdom for a normal dialogue box!
I’ve tried and failed to use VSCodium on a bunch of occasions for this reason. And a couple other ones. It’s like the UI got left in the InstaPot waaaay too long and now it’s just a soggy stewy mess.
Today I finally thought I’d take the first step toward android development. Completing a very simple hello world tutorial is proving to be challenging just because the window I see doesn’t precisely correspond to the screenshots. Trying to find the buttons/menus/tools is very slow as I am constantly getting lost. I only ever have this in applications with javascript-based UIs
Questions:
-
Am I the only one who faces this challenge?
-
Do I have to use Android Studio or it there some kind of native linux alternative?
edited to reflect correction that Android Studio is not electron
What IDEs have you used in the past?
Is it perhaps just modern (not necessarily better) layouts? Or tooling?
Software dev these days is a hell of a lot more complicated, however we are also standing on the shoulders of giants so it seems really easy as the complexity has been abstracted away.
So the following all drive me insane in exactly the same way:
- Android Studio
- VSCode/ium
- Submlime
- Brackets
- Atom
- various smaller projects that i uninstalled and can’t remember the names of them
They can be somewhat ameliorated by
- uninstalling/removing/hiding features that are not in use if possible (but risk having to spend 30 minutes looking for it if you ever need it)
- finding a high contrast theme so at least you can mostly see where one visual area stops and the next one begins
- Never opening more than a single document
- don’t use terminal, git or anything else. don’t use any sidebars. remove status bars.
by way of contrast, these ones are either not confusing, or confusing in their own unique ways:
- Kate
- Notepad++
- Geaney
- jEdit
- gedit
- Mousepad
- TextMate
- BBEdit
- Textadept
Only considering GUI-based editors.
I don’t really have much experience with any of the ones you mention that you like. However, I’m guessing they are more of a text editor.
All the ones you dislike lean more towards IDEs (if not actually being an IDE) because of the features they have over more basic text editors (like the ones you like).
And it seems like the feature that you dislike are part of an IDE toolset, whereas text editors (like sublime) may or may not include these features.
Why do you want an IDE (or IDE tooling) if you don’t want the extra features?
Could you just use a text editor and a separate compiler?
Could you just use a text editor and a separate compiler?
I don’t know? Could I? Specifically asking for android because the tutorials I find tell me to use Android Studio. Is it doing something essential and different?
Your issue seems to be less to do with electron or JS than it is to do with IDEs in general. Everything you said you dislike is an IDE, the ones you said are less confusing aren’t IDEs they’re text editors (some with extra macro buttons, but still not actual IDEs).
I’m confused what exactly you’re having issues with in IDEs? Part of what separates an IDE from a simple text editor is that it provides much more information to help you understand and modify complicated code bases. Perhaps your issue is that you’re simply not dealing with anything complicated enough to actually need the power of an IDE. Another possibility is that you don’t really understand the languages or systems you’re dealing with so you become confused about the extra info the IDE is providing you. Information overload, particularly as a beginner can be a very real problem as modern IDEs can be a little like drinking from a fire hose. They are by their nature information dense.
finding a high contrast theme so at least you can mostly see where one visual area stops and the next one begins
I don’t intend this to be rude, but do you perhaps have some kind of visual impairment? Could adjusting your display to use a higher UI scaling help? Maybe bump up the default font sizes? Have you tested to see if you have some kind of colorblindness? Many IDEs will have themes or options to help with these cases.
Information overload, particularly as a beginner can be a very real problem as modern IDEs can be a little like drinking from a fire hose. They are by their nature information dense.
All of what you mention is possible. Which is why I’m wondering if I need android studio to learn? Or can I use something simpler for now? Tutorials I find seem to want you to use AS. Does it do anything special?
Sort of reminds me of 101 intro beginner linux tutorial that begins with instructing the user to open vi. Even though eventually it’s good to know vi, nano is better to start with.
I don’t intend this to be rude, but do you perhaps have some kind of visual impairment? Could adjusting your display to use a higher UI scaling help? Maybe bump up the default font sizes? Have you tested to see if you have some kind of colorblindness?
I’ve done the ones where there is a circle of dots hat have a number in them and I can see all the numbers. Some of them are faint but I assume that’s expected.
But OTOH in general I find a lot of modern dark color schemes difficult especially the “low contrast” ones difficult to use. My guess has been it’s because I mostly have shitty old hardware and the schemes might be designed by people with fancy modern displays that fix it somehow. Or if you are using a tiling WM instead of stacking windows on top of one another, the fact that the titlebar of the active window melts into the content of the one behind it may be a non issue.
