978118 - Thimble needs a "Run" or manual preview button

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webmaker Graveyard :: Thimble, defect)

Description

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

If you are writing JS code in Thimble, the error console will (ideally) show you any errors in it when you run it.

Except that it will also show you lots of syntax errors caused by the fact that the Thimble preview keeps trying to run your code as you are writing it! I haven't tried it, but I'm willing to bet this would be really confusing for users, and make it much harder to use Thimble to teach JS.

Can we please have a "manual preview" or "Run" mode, which you can switch on, such that the user has to manually click "Preview" or "Run" in order for the code to be copied to the preview and run? This could be switched on by users when writing JS.

Gerv

Comment 1

[David Humphrey (:humph)]

Neat idea.  I think in the simple case just having a checkbox in the "Preview" pane that is default on, and can be turned off to stop the updates, would be pretty simple.

Comment 3

[Pomax]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.webmaker.org/pull/381

this adds a "reload" button to force reload the preview based on the sourcecode in the editor, without needing to type something in the editor to force a reparse.

It also adds the "run/do not run JS" checkbox so that you can turn off automatically running any and all code inside <script> tags.

Comment 4

[Scott [:thecount] Downe]

Comment on attachment 8386458 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.webmaker.org/pull/381

Some pretty trivial comments, easy fixes though.

Comment 5

[Pomax]

Comment on attachment 8386458 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.webmaker.org/pull/381

fixed the .overwrite issue. Also keeping it "reload" because unlike jsbin/fiddle we *alway* run, just either with or without JS interpreted.