Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Codux: Visual IDE for React

codux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: Codux: Visual IDE for React

#42

Post by ablatt89 »

spaceywilly wrote: post #18
ablatt89 wrote: post #17

Reminds me of Visual Studio drag and drop to generate UIs for Windows apps, or Xcode's storyboard for drag and drop UIs. Interestingly, Apple is transitioning to SwiftUI which is declarative. Nice to see an increase in drag and drop UI options for web apps!

Maybe it’s just me but I always found the storyboards to be a nightmare. When it works it is ok, but I would argue no faster than just writing the code. When it doesn’t work and you have to attempt to debug an issue, hoo boy. I know how to code, just let me code the UI.

Indeed, I recall Storyboards were nice for a first layout, but constraints were iffy on the Storyboard, and in the end, a lot of more complex UIs just had to be written programatically.

I remember around maybe 2013?, there was a UI component that was all the hype; the sliding options menu (where you hit the hamburger at the top and the menu would cover half the screen). I wanted to remake it and tried to do it with Storyboards and imperative code, but it never worked just quite right. When I got rid of the sliding menu UIView on the Storyboard and just wrote the UI programmatically via UIKit, it was hard to learn but the final product was a finely, tunable sliding options menu view :-)

Re: Codux: Visual IDE for React

#44

Post by jtwaleson »

This is awesome. I think developers would appreciate it if you include some projectional editing for the DOM tree. E.g. a toggle to switch between text-based projectional editing of the DOM and the view you have right now.

Re: Codux: Visual IDE for React

#45

Post by Omerke »

no_wizard wrote: post #36

This is something I wish could mash with Figma in some way, so Figma edits could be reflected back into the application in an intelligent way. I really like this. I think some folks have correctly identified that it may be incorrectly used (my opinion) as a low-code editor. It very well could be however I see it living in a different space: There has long been attempts at getting tools like Figma to produce assets th…

What a great comment! You’ve perfectly identified a big value point of Codux and have described it even better than I would :) (I’m Omer from Codux Product team). Our designers are already using Codux to manage styles and component structures, as we’re obviously building Codux within Codux.

Regarding some kind of a mash with Figma - even though we are looking at some possible ways of better synch between the tools in the future, the short answer is ‘not yet’. Even though design tools’ capabilities are getting highly advanced, they still have (and probably always have) unbridged gaps from real front-end development concerns, as you describe here. You can obviously keep Figma in your process while still working with Codux, but we’re here to help you build & maintain front-end code visually, in collaboration with designers, but on top of the real thing.

Re: Codux: Visual IDE for React

#47

Post by JanneJulJensen »

Gys wrote: post #27
rileyphone wrote: post #12

Interesting that this is by Wix. Although, I'm a little chafed that they claim its the "first visual IDE" for React when things like Henosia [0] already exist. 0. https://henosia.com/

I had a very quick look at the demos of both Codux and Henosia. The Henosia demo has all data hardcoded. To me that seems not a real world example. In my world the data are all variables, which usually effect the design considerably. The Codux demo seems to work with actual code and variables for the backend developer, while at the same time the designer sees data. So that makes it more interesting.

Yes, you're right, the 1½ minute video on our website is merely hardcoded data. That's because the main purpose of that video is to show that we're able to read AND write code, and able to push to AND pull from GitHub. Obviously we work with dynamic data as well, anything else would be a missed opportunity.

Re: Codux: Visual IDE for React

#48

Post by Caseee »

falleng0d wrote: post #40

After messing around with the tutorial project I think that this is a great tool that has a lot of potential. As developers are very particular and tend to customize their IDEs with a lot of extensions, I don't think this will replace the tools we have. But I do think that we should be able to customize a lot more The code editor especially should be able to receive most of the common settings such as font, theme, ..…

Codux dev team member here.

A lot of what you're suggesting here (prettier, eslint) is on our list, and even in the works - and I hope would reach users soon. Until we improve the experience around the built-in code editor (and perhaps even after), we've found that it's most comfortable for us to work side-by-side with Codux and our IDE of choice.

Re: Codux: Visual IDE for React

#49

Post by Caseee »

jtwaleson wrote: post #44

This is awesome. I think developers would appreciate it if you include some projectional editing for the DOM tree. E.g. a toggle to switch between text-based projectional editing of the DOM and the view you have right now.

Thanks for the kind words! (I'm a dev on Codux), and that's a pretty cool suggestion, I'll make sure we write it down and see if / when it's feasible.
Post reply on HN