In order for the canvas to be meaningful, the individual code windows need to be related to each other; eg. like a visual programming language or a notebook, with sockets and connectors.
Otherwise, it needs to be more like canva / miro, where the canvas is a rich target to place notes and graphics with the code editor embedded in it.
I think iterating on the linear jupyter notebook (eg. make it a graph of executable script blocks) is a worthwhile thing to do... but just having multiple code windows side by side is something you can already do, with normal code editors.
So... I think most people will find this isn't as exciting as they imagine.
I downloaded it and had a play; honestly I found it quite charming and it worked well, but I immediately wanted to put sticky notes next to my code files like it was a miro board, and then zoom out to see all the files arranged together; but you can do neither of those things with it currently.
So... cool idea, but after using it for 30 minutes or so I couldn't really see any particular reason currently to not just go back to vscode...
I really really wanted to open it up, drop 5 files onto the canvas and them zoom out and edit them all at the same time, and I couldn't.
(but hey, you can literally just download and run it, and it works. Have a play, see what you think. That's just my first impression of it)
(side note: boo. AI. There's literally zero value in the AI attached to this. Just rely on your vscode extensions if you want that. Having it baked into the editor is lame 'I also do AI!' hype. I couldn't see any reason it has, or you would want, to have baked in AI instead of any normal vscode AI extension)
We do show arrows between related objects (if you CMD+click on symbols, or use the floating toolbar to zoom into a function) and you can traverse the codebase like a graph. Do you feel like that is insufficient? If so, what would you prefer?
Curious about "then zoom out to see all the files arranged together". You can zoom using CMD/CTRL + scrolling. Is this what you want?
Our intent is to go more in the direction of "like a visual programming language or a notebook, with sockets and connectors" and make editing/refactoring easier.
RE AI: that's valid, but we do use it to cut the tedium out of finding the right interface/class to add a method/function to.
If you’ve used any canvas style app you’ll fully appreciate that zooming out and then zooming back in is almost without fail the way people navigate.
Even visual code editors. You’ve used the unreal blueprint editor right?
They do not use search.
Search is for finding canvases not for navigating around them.
Jumping between symbols with a command is what existing editors do. You’re doing your excellent work a disservice by sticking to ways of interacting you can already do in existing editors.
You can just use a normal editor for that.
(The same goes for any kind of AI symbol search; it is maybe valuable, but why would you not just have it an an extension in an existing editor? It’s like the rabbit; why was it not just an android app? -> no reason. The AI in it was not meaningfully linked to the functionality of the device)
Re: zoom out.
Ohhhh… that’s lovely. That’s what I wanted. You should put that in your demo.
I tried scrolling and cmd-+ but that zooms the entire ui.
That’s a super power. You should make it more obvious you can do that.
+1 for expanding jupyter notebooks to non linear layouts.
While trying out some code I would love to be able to explore multiple "trains of thought" (without having to move code in and out from normal python files).
Otherwise, it needs to be more like canva / miro, where the canvas is a rich target to place notes and graphics with the code editor embedded in it.
I think iterating on the linear jupyter notebook (eg. make it a graph of executable script blocks) is a worthwhile thing to do... but just having multiple code windows side by side is something you can already do, with normal code editors.
So... I think most people will find this isn't as exciting as they imagine.
I downloaded it and had a play; honestly I found it quite charming and it worked well, but I immediately wanted to put sticky notes next to my code files like it was a miro board, and then zoom out to see all the files arranged together; but you can do neither of those things with it currently.
So... cool idea, but after using it for 30 minutes or so I couldn't really see any particular reason currently to not just go back to vscode...
I really really wanted to open it up, drop 5 files onto the canvas and them zoom out and edit them all at the same time, and I couldn't.
(but hey, you can literally just download and run it, and it works. Have a play, see what you think. That's just my first impression of it)
(side note: boo. AI. There's literally zero value in the AI attached to this. Just rely on your vscode extensions if you want that. Having it baked into the editor is lame 'I also do AI!' hype. I couldn't see any reason it has, or you would want, to have baked in AI instead of any normal vscode AI extension)