I just read about gtoal's troubles with deleting variables because they were generated the wrong way. Since that happened to me as well a couple of times, I wonder if there ever was an idea to make a modification of the Scratch editor that helps avoiding these issues.

My ideas:
1. give local and global variables a slightly different color in the editor
1a. add a context menu to change a variable type from global to local
2. mark “without screen refresh” custom blocks with a different color (or a rabbit icon)
3. add a mode that allows to make hacked blocks
4. add a clean-up function that uses only two columns and includes some space between the code blocks

What do you think? Further ideas?

Does such a project exist already?

I would no-support 3 because scratchers won't need that tool really much

I support the others

frodewin wrote:

My ideas:
1. give local and global variables a slightly different color in the editor
1a. add a context menu to change a variable type from global to local
2. mark “without screen refresh” custom blocks with a different color (or a rabbit icon)
3. add a mode that allows to make hacked blocks
4. add a clean-up function that uses only two columns and includes some space between the code blocks

The ‘local variable’ setting would be pretty nifty. Also, it wouldn't be too hard to add an icon to “without screen refresh” blocks.
Instead of adding a ‘hacked blocks mode’, it would be far easier to just extend the number of configuration options that the block creator has. Maybe manually entering a blockspec would be the best option, like in Panther.
I don't know how the ‘clean up’ code works, but it probably gets the ‘bounding box’ of the blocks (i.e. the smallest square which contains the entire script) and arranges them based on that. It probably wouldn't be too hard to change.
Another idea which would be awesome is to add error handling to Scratch. This would probably take an entire re-write of Interpreter.as though, because Interpreter.as is single-threaded and does not have exceptions in any way. I think it'd be a nifty thing to add into Leopard, so maybe I'll look into that.

I'm not sure how many 2.0 mods exist, but I don't think any of them contain these features yet. I think Leopard is probably the closest you'll get to an ‘advanced scratch editor’ at the moment, though. (#shamelessadvertisement)


And by the way, I am DigiTechs. I'll log into DigiTechs when I get home from school to confirm.

I especially like the different coloring for locals and globals because I you have to show the vars to see whether they're global or local.

Support! (i want hacked block mode now!)

DrKat123 wrote:

I would no-support 3 because scratchers won't need that tool really much

I support the others

That's funny, I support 3 and nosupport others. :P

Support I like ALL of the features!

Number 3 is the best though

frodewin wrote:

1. give local and global variables a slightly different color in the editor

YES I'm always terrified that my cloud variables are suddenly not cloud anymore, I end up using the API to check that they're still there

-Radical- wrote:

DrKat123 wrote:

I would no-support 3 because scratchers won't need that tool really much

I support the others

That's funny, I support 3 and nosupport others. :P

Same here.

I need to add at least these features to my mod right now

I support all these things.

Maybe not 3 for the official scratch editor, but for a mod then yes