Suggestions for the plugin developer community
I appreciate that Jetbrains brought this community forum to a new design and above all that Idea developers spend some of their time here to answer questions. I wonder if the community wouldn't benefit if we had a way to chat. I don't expect Idea developers to hang out there, but with so many available Idea plugins (and therefore, people who write the code), there must be more people that like to discuss features, implementations, the API, etc. from time to time.
Therefore, would it be possible to instantiate a dedicated chatroom for us to hang out? If this room is advertised on the web page, I'm sure it would attract people.
Another thing is the current editor that is used when writing forum posts. I know that code is highlighted when I copy it directly from Idea, but this is not always possible (e.g. with stack traces). Is it possible to make the editor more developer friendly so that we can mark text as code? YouTrack has a nice markdown like language which works excellent, and I don't expect the forum editor to be exactly like this, but would it be possible to at least support "mark as code", "quote text" and maybe some headings?
Cheers
Patrick
Please sign in to leave a comment.
I'd like to echo Patrick's thanks to the JetBrains developers for spending a lot more time here answering questions recently, it's much appreciated. In the last year or so the responsiveness has really stepped up, and it's a very useful resource these days.
I'd like a chat too, but I understand the reluctance to add yet another support channel - it's a problem I suffer from too. It's also tricky to know what the best option is for a large community - Slack doesn't work well for that use case because of its pricing model (too expensive for large communities, and 10k limit for the free plan means that valuable content disappears forever very quickly). Gitter is probably a better option although I don't like it as much. There's also the question of which Github repo should be used for it - perhaps the IntelliJ community source, or the intellij-plugins repo?
I'd also love to see more formatting options here. But you can actually mark paragraphs of text as code now using the paragraph styles button in the toolbar above the editor:
That said, I'd love some better options for this.
This forum is a solution by ZenDesk and they do not support Markdown, unfortunately.
You can select the code paragraph, then set it as Code:
Headings are also supported, quotes would be nice to have, indeed.
We'll discuss the chat idea with the team, but from my experience hanging out in #idea-users IRC channel on FreeNode, chat is not the best place to get the answers. There could be 200 users "online" and most questions will still remain without an answer unless there is some dedicated person from JetBrains assigned to this job. Also user may ask a question and leave the channel and because of the time zone differences the answer would be provided several hours later unnoticed by the user who has already left.
Another point is that forum is indexed by the search engines and the answers could be found easier rather than in the chat logs/history.
Even on this developer oriented forum most of the answers are provided by JetBrains team.
Our developers are not available online 24/7 to monitor the chat, so this forum is much more convenient way of providing support and for the plug-in developers to get help.
If you want to just hang out in a chat, #idea-users@FreeNode is probably the best place. There are not many plug-in developers there, however.
This is embarrassing! It seems I never clicked on the "paragraph style" button and I have no idea why. That helps!
Beeing a long time member of the StackExchange network, I fully understand all objections against questions asked in a chat. After all, StackExchange is quite strict about that proper questions belong in a proper forum post. Nevertheless, what I see is, that a lot of work is currently done by Jetbrain guys (and gals!) and that we as a community only profit from it but it's hard to give something back. We have over 2000 plugins, so it is safe to assume that we should have at least 500 plugin developers and I'm sure we could help each other and take some of the work off your back. I don't know, why there is not more "community feeling" or maybe it is just my perception.
@Serge If you're going to discuss this with the team, maybe the bigger question is if there is a way to bring non-Jetbrains developers closer together. The suggestion for a chat was the only thing I could think of. As I see this, we have two groups of people: Active Idea developers who have a pretty good overview of the overwhelmingly large API and people like myself, who write code in their free time trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel with each new feature they try to implement.
Patrick, I just discovered that formatting in comments will take HTML formatted text, which can be pasted in the comment and will preserve formatting. For me it is a great discovery because I usually write and format posts in IDEA using my plugin: Markdown Navigator and then paste the Markdown in the post.
Having to format the post in the comment was a huge barrier, especially when pasting code which would remove all leading indents unless the code style was selected first.
Now I can work as before, write the post in IDEA and copy Markdown as HTML to paste into the post. Giving me fenced code, tables and other formatting elements with a backup of the text which helps when a long post is lost due to some glitch in the browser.
If you have any application capable copying mime text/html format to the clipboard then you can paste it into the comment and it will preserve formatting.
Regarding bringing plugin developers together, it is a good idea and has been brought up several times before. The community feeling that you are not feeling is correct. We plugin developers seem to be a secluded bunch.
In my case, what happened is that due to lack of an active community and long response time or non responses to questions, I had to figure out what I needed for myself and got busy with my plugin efforts.
Spending less time following these discussions since the ROI on effort was diminishing and I got busy. Seems to happen with most plugin developers after a while. The initial enthusiasm of hope fades as a feeling that there is no plugin developer community sets in.
I would point out that JetBrains team is doing a great job to support the forums, but it is not a community of plugin developers which would create motivation through synergy.
@Vladimir, that is a great finding. I usually use markdown as well for all kinds of things.
The last weeks I was online in the IRC channel, but the traffic there is non-existent. If there was a question or chat, then it was about some IntelliJ product. Since we have so many of them, it’s often not even possible to help because most stuff is language specific. It’s really awkward to have a silent IRC channel where over 150 people are online :)
It seems we have to live with this situation and all of us stay lonely strangers. Anyway, many thanks for the tip with copying HTML. I created this post with an online markdown editor :)