Make Windhawk a bit more developer friendly

[Nebur99]

Currently Windhawk when in developer mode

• forces the 'Activity Bar' to be hidden and
• when the user manages to make the 'Activity Bar' visible, it pops-up a notification when the user switches to a 'tab' on the activity bar other than Windhawk

It would be great to have a setting that disables both.

I really like to see the 'Activity Bar' and I don't need a reminder regarding the Windhawk tab being invisible when I switch to e.g. the Explorer view.

Result:

This helps being able to easily show the Code Outline for example. This is specially useful considering we are forced to have all the code in a single file.

Currently I'm unminifying extension.js after every installation and commenting the conflicting code out:

Having a kind of advanced setting instead would be great.

[m417z]

The compilation sidebar is required for compilation to work. But if you really like the outline, you can drag it to another location, such as the sidebar on the right or part of the terminal. Have you tried that?

[Nebur99]

Not sure . I just work with the code with the activity bar enabled and switch to windhawk on the activity bar, when I need to compile/run and back to other views / debug etc. as required. I know I could do all that using kbd shortcuts etc. but to be honest I'm a point&click guy and like familiar environments . Basically the suggested 'switch' re-enables the familiar VSCode environment many are used too.

I get why you decided to 'obfuscate' Codium/VSCode - thus the suggestion to provide according switches buried in the advanced settings and away from regular users with no interest in doing custom injections / fixes to those daily annoyances we find in random black box software.

And thanks for replying! I appreciate it!

[m417z]

I wasn't talking about keyboard shortcuts. I was talking about this:

wh_outline.mp4

I get why you decided to 'obfuscate' Codium/VSCode

I didn't 'obfuscate' it, it's a standard minification to reduce the size and make it load faster. The source code is right here in the repo. If you really want, you can compile it yourself and have your own Windhawk build.

[m417z]

Looks like you can even place them together:

[Nebur99]

I wasn't implying any negative connotation with 'obfuscation' and it was not really about the minified js code at all. Bad choice of words on my side maybe. Sorry...

What I meant with 'obfuscation' is that it isn't immediately apparent that we are in Codium/VSCode when looking at the Windhawk UI - which is a good thing for 99.9% of the users!

Still at least to me - it would be a + to be able to 'unlock' the editor environment as we know it (with its side bar not disappearing each restart and no notifications when switching away from the windhawk extension).

If you don't like the idea or consider it unnecessary - that's fine by me. I won't stop loving wh either way :)

[m417z]

Yeah, "obfuscation" and "black box" had a different connotation in my mind. Thanks for clarifying, and also for clarifying your intent which is not only about the outline view, but, as I understand it, the whole experience.

Indeed, Windhawk aims for a simplistic UI, even in the more advanced editing mode. It worked well so far for most users and use cases. I personally don't miss the other items, such as the file view (mods are single-file) and the menu. That's why I thought the outline was the main thing, as I see how it can be useful. But having the option for a more VSCode-ish UI is a good thing. I'll consider adding an advanced option for the items you mentioned, so that patching Windhawk won't be necessary.

[Nebur99]

The black box annoyances are what is super easy to fix with wh (+some ghidra perhaps). WH certainly isn't the black box I was referring to at all! Clearly a misunderstanding...

Wh to me is rather the 5 star comfort suite to fix stuff I'm not supposed to w/o even getting dirty fingers :)

[m417z]

That's great feedback, that's exactly the idea behind Windhawk :)
Regarding the two changes, I'll add environment variables to control the two items.