I know that 90% of my suggestions get thrown out, (perhaps rightly so) but on rare occasions they might get honoured, so I haven't give up making suggestions.
Most of my macros are hundreds of actions long, and when I minimize the grouped actions, it would be nice to easily see which actions contain the most sub-actions. For example, if I have a macro that looks like this...
...what I would like to see is some indication of where the majority of my macro is, perhaps like the following: (pardon my artistic skills, I was thinking more of a gradient shade of grey rather than a yellow rectangle.) Here's an example of what I would like to see...
The bar would be an indication of the number of sub-actions, rather than the number of bytes of storage. It would also need to work on the actions inside a "grouped" action, (eg, While, Until, Group) if I expanded the grouped action.
Since it's perhaps related, I'd like to point out that I use the colour-coding of actions a LOT, and it would be nice if I could enable a colour box that would let me recolour an action with a single click, rather than with a series of mouse clicks and menu selections. Here's how I would envision it looking:
Some people may not want to see colour options like this, so the default for this option could be turned off in the KM Editor's preferences.
Perhaps the box of colours could be made smaller by making two rows of colours. Hmm, perhaps if you click on the colour it already is set to, then it turns grey (i.e., no colour.)
I change the "description" of the actions to make it clearer what they do when they're minimized, like this:
Also, I make extensive use of colored actions, which makes it easier to delve into the guts of each section. And you could use color to help find the sections you jump to most often (green, in this case):
Just thought I'd mention this. I do actually think having a count might be nice too.
But organizing things with comments, groups and colors helps me to keep track of what's going on, even during development. It helps keep my logic modularized, so I can focus on the higher level, and drill down only when I need to.
Everybody has their own styles, for sure, but let me just say that my experience as a professional developer has led me to modularize things as much as possible, as early as possible, so I can say "OK, that part's done, and it does XYZ". Of course it's never really done, but you know what I mean.
Please pester Peter pertaining to pending proposals purely pursuant to proper procedure (pardon a pedantic protocol prescription, perhaps proffered pointlessly).
Macros.kmmacros|attachment