Coder feature request: file saved indicators

Sorry if this is in the wrong place.

I’d like to request that save state indicators (which show whether a file has been saved or not) are added to the title of each code window (as it appears at the top of the code window tab pane - next to that window’s close box).

There seems to be a subtle alteration of the save icon depending on save state - but it’s hard to see, and only applies to the currently selected tab.

This is a very important feature because, when editing multiple code files, it’s very important to know that they’ve all been saved before running - otherwise, when writing an experiment that’s split across multiple files, one has to exhaustively check that they’re all saved before running.

It’s good practice to split a very long experiment into multiple files, and this feature would make it much easier to develop in this way.

Cheers
Fintan

This wouldn’t be too hard to implement (a contributor did add asterix symbols to code component tabs for the same reason in the Builder a while ago).

As discussed in your other post How can I get an interactive debugging shell in the Coder? it isn’t our aim to focus a great deal of time in making PsychoPy Coder amazing though because there are many other options out there and there are more important things for us to fix in PsychoPy.

So, happy to take a pull request with this feature added but I’m not personally going to be working on it anytime soon.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for your swift feedback. It seems like the save indicator would be a very valuable feature - it would lead to much fewer “my experiment isn’t doing what I think because I forgot to save an imported file” errors.

That seems like a sensible approach to take about the Coder as well. I haven’t spent much time yet running PsychoPy code from other editors, but as long as that doesn’t present any problems, all is well.

Best

Fintan

PyCharm is really good, even the free Community edition.

I’ve been developing on Pycharm + Anaconda + Psychopy + PyQt on Ubuntu 16 and 17 for a couple of months, there have been no issues with PyCharm in that combination.

best,
Allen

Allen,

Thanks for the recommendation - I will have a go!

Best,

Fintan

+1 from me PyCharm is amazingly good, even just using the CE version. It takes a while to learn the clever features because there are so many and they’re unconventional, but leave tips turned on and gradually learn them.