What is your preferred IDE for coding for hubitat? ..
I'm currently using Visual Studio 2019 ..
But I have been really considering a switch to IntelliJ.. But I'm on the fence.. It's better understanding of groovy is both a nice thing and an annoyance (when it comes to questioning every api call to the platform it doesn't know about).. It would be nice to catch more stupid mistakes before pasting it into the hub's ide
I take IntelliJ over VS any time, however, for hubitat I just do it in the Web-UI of HE. I go to an IDE if my code get's "bigger", smaller single file projects I still do in vi if it is not HE related
I haven't coded/used the Hubitat built in editor in a long time. For most coding I prefer Jetbrains products. I use PyCharm a lot and I also like IntelliJ. When I was doing HS plugins I used Visual Studio.
For a lot of small things or testing or even notes I use VS Code a lot or really quick just vi at the terminal.
All my coding is done in the Web-IDE. Mainly because I like the ability to just hit save, switch tab and refresh to test quickly.
I do heavily use code folding/searching A LOT so my projects don't look too overwhelming and I can jump around fast. I wish there was a fold all hotkey though just to make my life easier.
I am just using the hub's web IDE primarily although I copy/paste it to Notepad++ a fair amount of the time for working on it when I am not home or for the easier find/replace functions.
If you don't configure the groovy environment in IntelliJ it doesn't try to auto-compile or auto-sense third party libs. It just does code formatting and auto-sense of the GDK. That's how I roll unless I do it directly in the HE web editor. I hate the HE web editor though because it doesn't format case statements. Also, in some situations with closures it just totally effs up adds extra indents to every expression after the closure until the end of the file. On top of that the web editor doesn't understand the ++ or -- operators and adds extra indents to every expression after the operator.
Most of my bigger groovy files aren't formattable from HE's web editor and a lot of my smaller ones aren't either because of case statements or the ++/-- operators. The web interface would be so much better with just the case statement and operator tweak.
I've reported both of those issues btw but no fixes so far. They DID at least fix the space vs tab vs 2 vs 4 issue though. The web interface to me is extremely, EXTREMELY aggravating because of those flaws.
If i was a professional developer who uses Visual Studio 2019 day in and day out (and I am!) and I wanted something lighter, I would for sure use Visual Studio Code + this extension
Why go with anything different than you are comfortable with? More time coding, less time dealing with frustrations of a new environment
Code folding doesn't persist at all in the IDE though so everytime you re-open a file you have to manually go through it again - don't you (please say no !)
Honestly, I can't get my finger around how it works. I could fold all my methods and save the code. Close the window and visit it later and they are still folded. But then sometimes I open some code and it's all unfolded. And then there are times when I open code and some are folded and some are unfolded.
I could never figure out how to make it all consistent.
A lot of the time though it stays folded. So its not enough to drive me mad.
I would consider VS Code except that this environment support doesn't have an auto-formatter. What's the point of an IDE that doesn't have an auto-formatter?
