Script Editor Performance

[bob at bobhall.net]

The script editor in Livecode is absolutely horrid performance wise. There plenty of issues but the scrolling performance bothers me to no end — AGAIN!

I develop on a 3 year old iMac 27” with 24G of ram. The Livecode IDE is by far the worst IDE/Script Editor that I use (sorry to say). I’m finding lately that developing in Livecode to be a frustrating experience compared to other tools that I use (yes I know and use Atom and Sublime).

I just searched quality.livecode.com <http://quality.livecode.com/> and see no bugs open on performance issues related to the Script Editor. This surprises me. Maybe I’m just not finding the bug reports??

I went in and looked at some code I fixed a couple of years ago. Based on what’s been done, there’s a difference of opinion between myself and the team that maintains the Script Editor code. I can see that changes have been made that cause the UX issues I’m seeing (along with a bug in the code that I’ve found). I’ve changed the code to the way I think things should be done on my local machine and LC script editor is almost usable again. 

I’d love to get some feedback on one of my fixes. I’m not seeing any issues but I need to get feedback across a few machines (Windows/Linux) to confirm my changes before creating a pull request. If you are an advanced user and are willing to hack up a file within the Application bundle, shoot me a note and I’ll get you one specific change I made that I think you’ll agree is a benefit. In 1 week I’ve not seen any negative side effect. Fingers crossed...

Bob H.