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godotengine / godot-proposals

Godot Improvement Proposals (GIPs)
MIT License
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Separate Help from Code Editor #9780

Open inhalt120g opened 3 months ago

inhalt120g commented 3 months ago

Describe the project you are working on

Applies to any project.

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project

The list of open scripts can get long if a project is somewhat complex. And since there aren't that many options for sorting script list other than filtering and rearranging (nothing more advanced like grouping, adding separators, colors or icons or anything else to distinguish them visually), it can get a bit unwieldy.

And on top of that when I want to open and check something in Help, that too gets added to the list of scripts. This makes the list of scripts hard to use.

It also makes no sense to mix two conceptually different parts together: Scripts are meant to be edited (so the customer will be typing something, deleting… interacting etc) while Help is meant to be read (can't be edited directly).

As a "solution" I just never read the inbuilt Help but read the online documentation instead, which is again not ideal because it requires me to always keep a tab (or a few) open and switching to a browser can be deconcentrating.

Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation

Help should be moved to the top, together with 2D, 3D, Script and Asset Library.

Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudo-code, mock-ups, and/or diagrams

In addition to 2D, 3D, Script and Asset Library, there should be a Help tab too. Edit: Functionally, once opened the Help can mimic the online version of Help, so on the left there's the Search / Topics column and on the right the main text.

If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?

It would be used often if I could just keep Help separate from Scripts, I don't think it can be worked around with a few lines of script.

Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?

The proposal is about basic Editor usage.

lostminds commented 2 months ago

And there could then be an option to open Help in a new separate window now that the editor allows multiple windows. So you can move it to a second monitor for example. Currently you can pop out the script editor as a separate window, but this moves both the scripts and the help out into the same window.