Idea: IntelliJ plugin to show thumbnails of sketches

OPENRNDR Feature requests
#1

Hi! Now that I’m getting closer to 200 OPENRNDR sketches I struggle to remember which one is which.

I thought that it would be very useful to have a plugin for Idea to show thumbnails of sketches and load the code by clicking on the image. It would be like the current list of files on the left pane, but with images above each .kt file.

Here are the instructions to create a plugin: Building Plugins with Gradle—IntelliJ Platform Plugin SDK Has anyone tried this before? I haven’t yet.

There is one open source plugin which might serve as inspiration: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7874-android-drawable-viewer

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Maybe it could even become the OPENRNDR plugin if other useful features are developed (snippets? shadeStyles? Built-in guide?)

What do you think? Would this be a useful addition?

2 Likes
#2

I thought about embedding some base64-encoded metadata into the top of the file.

Or your idea was about generating pictures dynamically?

#3

Metadata yes, but I thought about putting a path to an image. Something like

// @thumb="/my/thumb.jpg"

Base64 might look noisy for a meaningful 24bit thumb, or?

#4

Yeah, I like your option more. Alternative is to keep images data in a separate folder and generate uuids for sketches instead (for linking).

#5

I thought of automating it too, but I often rename my sketches. Well maybe we can have different options, like first look at the metadata, if it’s not there, look in a folder for a png with the same name as the .kt file.