Since the day they started experimenting with the new online code editor, my day-to-day work life has been completely ruined.
I assume they didn't optimize for Firefox, and since that's the browser I use for development, I can say, it's borderline unusable there. I can't say much about the Chrome experience, since I refuse to use it for development work. It shouldn't even be a matter of which browser you edit code in to begin with. But I digress, here are some "fun" stuff happening in the new editor that did not happen in the old one.
- The code editor leaks memory. One time I lost an hour of work, because it overloaded my system memory, and I couldn't save what I wrote before the tab crashed. I actually happened to have the control panel open with the performance tab being active, and I checked: after the browser tab crashed, my system memory consumption dropped by 12(!) gigabytes. You are pretty much better off writing your code in advance in a different editor like Notepad++ or something, and paste your code instead.
- The code lazy loading is ridiculously buggy. When you had the editor open for for some time and you are doing work, the lazy loading just stops functioning alltogether. What you can do, is you can click on lines, and once you do, the lazy loading wakes up all of the sudden, and starts loading the adjacent lines. You'd have to do this every 50-100 lines or so, to have the code readable and workable though. This effectively forces your to refresh your code editor every 15-20~ minutes-ish if you want to remain somewhat productive.
- In addition to the previous point, once you refresh the editor, you lose all the opened files, except for the one you were last editing.
- You cannot reorder the opened files at the top tabs. In the previous editor you could.
- The search is beyond unusable. To close it in FF, you have to be pixel perfect to hit the left side of the 'x' to close it, otherwise it is hidden below the scroll bar, so if you don't manage to close it, you just scroll in the code instead. For some unknown circumstances (I was not able to find a consistant way to reproduce this), but, if you switch tabs (files) or you use the search, sometimes you get a random "This page could not be loaded" error page, and you have to refresh the editor page twice to have it loaded again. Of course if this happens, if you had anything that you did not save prior to this error, you can say goodbye to that.
- Let's say you have multiple files open at a time, like three or more. There are cases (more often than not), that your cursor position doesn't get saved properly, ending up in you getting dropped to the top of the file once you check back on it. This is extremely annoying if you have bigger files to work in (which is not rare), and with the barely functioning search function, you also have a difficult time getting back to where you were previously. When the lazy loading issue kicks in, this experience becomes even more exponentially worse.
- I did not use the dark mode in the previous editor, as I found the syntax highlighting a bit awkward to work with due to the chosen colors, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't enjoy a dark theme. We have dark theme available in the dev docs, why don't we have it in the editor as well?
- ...And I'm pretty sure there's more, these were just the ones from the top of my head.
Fortunately, I'm not always forced to use the online code editor. the Shopify CLI for themes is a god blessed thing, and when I'm able to, I'll always resort in using the CLI instead of trying to struggle through my day in the new online code editor. You should be using it as well if you haven't yet. The problem arises, when I'm unable to choose the CLI over the online code editor, when it's a development store I have to work in, or when there are others working in different parts of a theme simultaneously. And sadly, this happens more often than not.
In summary, I'm relly not sure what went wrong and why did we need a complete replacement of a thing that was already working almost perfectly, with a thing that is barely functional. Like, these issues are such major oversights, I refuse to believe that the new editor has been tested throughoutly. Please, for the sake of everyone's sanity, do something, or at least let us use the old editor for the time being you address the bugs and issues.
