Soliciting Community Feedback: Do You Use the Built-In Code Editor? about cadquery-freecad-module

[easyw]

Hi @jmwright
personally I use an external editor.
May be @poeschlr or @Misca1234 or @Shackmeister could give you an other feed back

[Misca1234]

I have never used the built in editor, I do not even use the cadquery editor in FreeCad, only external.

PS
If you are looking for a new hobby project, I would suggest a spice simulator ;)
DS

[poeschlr]

I nearly always used the internal editor. (at least at some stages of the development of my scripts.)

I however do not really need many features of it. (At least none that an external editor could not supply)
As long as there is some way to quickly build a model from a file i am fully ok with using an external editor. Ideally there would also be some botton to update from a changed source file or even better a way to automatically update the model if the source file changes.

[jmwright]

@poeschlr There's an execute_on_save setting in Settings.py that will save the script automatically every time you save file in the external editor.

I had done a simple code editor in Qt awhile back for another project. I've started a branch where I've swapped out PyQode for that custom editor. It lacks a lot of features, but I think it's usable. Beta feedback would be appreciated. Keep in mind though that you're only evaluating the built-in editor. The external editor functionality is broken in that branch because I'm looking to separate it out. I think that if you use an external editor, it would be nice if the workbench ignored the built-in editor and just displayed the 3D model. Currently the file watcher is tied in with PyQode, so you have to have the text open in PyQode to get execute_on_save functionality.

[tolot27]

I've started using the internal editor because I could not find an external one which shows the created shapes without any error.
In general, I use Visual Studio Code for development but did not try the execute_on_save setting yet.

[tolot27]

What I would really appreciate is if the 3D view would be part of/attached to/side-by-side to the internal editor window. That would allow switching between different tabs of the editor much easier. I don't like the window tiling, if I have more than one cadquery script open.

[jmwright]

@tolot27 That's an interesting idea. I'm not sure there's a Python binding for the 3D view in FreeCAD, but I'll look into it. I can add it as a setting if it's a possibility. I would probably use that side-by-side view a lot.

[jmwright]

Posting this related link here for my own information.

https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Embedding_FreeCADGui

[jmwright]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I've taken your comments into account as I'm working towards FreeCAD 0.18 compatibility. Feel free to continue commenting, but I'm going to close this for now.