Features
This extension aims to make working with the Electron codebase and build-tools more human-friendly, by building a UX on top to enhance the experience. It provides high-level views and functionality for things like patches, tests, and the documentation. It also integrates build-tools functionality such as build and sync into the UI, providing a better VS Code experience.
Syncing and building are provided as commands in the command palette. Building gives a progress bar as it goes. Any errors encountered during building are shown as problems in the workspace, and will be shown in the files where they were encountered.
In the docs directory, linting of relative links is provided. This ensures that links have a correct path to a file, and that the URL fragment is valid.
There's also a helper for prettifying Markdown tables in the source. This has no affect on how they are rendered, but it makes it nicer for humans working with the docs.
A debugger launch configuration is provided for debugging the native C++ code on Windows. This configuration pulls the executable name and root directory from build-tools, so it will use whichever build-tools config is active and does not require being manually edited.
It can also be extended to provide an open dialog for picking the Electron project to run, but this requires some manual changes to the launch.json file.
Configs for build-tools are shown in the sidebar. The active config can be changed, configs can be removed, and configs can be sanitized. Clicking on a config will open the file for viewing or manually editing. There is schema support for the config file which provides descriptions and suggestions.
Patches are shown in the sidebar in a human-friendly manner. They're displayed in the order they are applied, and show the files changed by that patch. Clicking a file will open the diff view for that file. Patches can also be refreshed (that is, exported again).
Tests are shown in the sidebar in a human-friendly manner. Currently only the main process (spec-main) and renderer (spec) tests are shown. The tests are parsed from the codebase and shown in nested tree form, with the ability to run only the tests at any specific level, from runner down to individual tests. Test files can be opened from this view as well.
Errors that occur during a test are shown as problems in the workspace and in the file they occurred in.
The Electron documentation is shown in the sidebar in a human-friendly manner. The layout aims to replicate the layout on the Electron website, although that's a work in progress. Clicking items in the tree shows the rendered Markdown for human-friendly reading. Double clicking the rendered Markdown will open the file for editing.
