Hi,
after using Live Coding a bit, here’s my suggestion to make Live Coding (especially the console) less frustrating to use.
Add two new preferences to Live Coding section of Editor Preferences:
- New “Minimize to Tray” checkbox:
- When enabled, minimizing will send the console window to system tray instead of taskbar, making it much harder to mistake for the editor window.
- New “Console pop-up” enum options with following options:
- Always: The current behavior.
- On Warning: The console will pop up only when there’s been warning or error during the build.
- On Error: The console will pop up only when there’s been error during the build.
- Never: The console window will not pop up on its own and steal focus. It can only be opened by the user manually clicking on the taskbar or tray icon.
When on tray, add small dot to the bottom right of the icon to indicate status of last build:
- No dot: The console just launched but no build has been done yet.
- Green: Last build succeeded.
- Yellow: Last build succeeded with warnings.
- Red: Last build failed with error.
This status dot will be especially useful with Never Console pop-up mode.
Live coding is great except the UX, so I think these relatively small changes would make it much more useful.