I'm new to Scratch and can see the benefit of using a drag and drop interface to edit scripts. But for seasoned software developers/engineers, editing the code via a text editor would be more efficient. One of my typical problems is that dragging and dropping isn't precise enough.. Or a want to edit a lot of code at once and the mouse-based interface doesn't accommodate that.

Thanks!

yes it would be useful. Unfortunately scratch isn't intended for ‘seasoned software developers’, so, no…

you can use tosh if you don't mind downgrading to scratch 2.0
also downgrading to scratch 2.0 may break some scripts once you share it on the site.

scratchimall wrote:

I'm new to Scratch… One of my typical problems is that dragging and dropping isn't precise enough..

This may or may not help…
When I first started I found things were always irritatingly dropping into the wrong place, but I then realised I wasn't checking to see what was being illuminated when I dragged something into position. Scratch illuminates the bit into which something will be dropped when you release the mouse button. So it's more precise than I initially realised, and I got much better at dragging and dropping accurately.

It's useful, but Scratch is meant to be an introduction. If you want to continue, you should start with something like Javascript, Python, C, etc.

it will be very useful even for novice to see the “text representation” of the visual code editor.
scratch is useful for the animation, the sprites, sounds, etc. which instead of finding a new tool to use it..
we can use scratch.. but for the little advanced users.. they should be able to edit the code using a text editor.

I would think this will be trivial for scratch developers to implement and made available.

anyway.. this is my comment. Hope someone can agree and find ways to implement.

Have to agree with you. Being able to search through the code for occurrences of variables, for example, would be really useful. Scratch 2 allowed you to identify which sprites were sending/receiving broadcasts but you still had to search manually for them.

But importing the text back into Scratch would involve new tools - checking the validity of code, variable names etc. So you have to decide whether variables have to be predefined or just created as met - given different scopes for variables predefining would seem better. What about things like sensing blocks referring to sprites by name though - do spritenames also need to be pre-defined. Just a couple of exampes. None of that is impossible but it gets close to having to define another language which is a distraction for the ST.

So I suspect this is only likely if someone with the right level of experience creates it as an unofficial tool.

There is Tosh, which is available to edit text-base scratch 2 code, but as for scratch 3, I haven't found anything yet.