Support Cyberbrain in more editors and IDEs

[laike9m]

Support Cyberbrain in more editors and IDEs

[alexmojaki]

I think editor integrations is the wrong idea. I spent a long time making a birdseye plugin for PyCharm and it was a big mistake. It was a huge amount of work, it didn't add that much value, and now it doesn't even work any more and it's not worth my time to fix it.

I suggest you make an interface that can be used in the browser, similar to birdseye or heartrate. Then people can use it even if they code in notepad.

Beyond that, I still think the minimal CLI that I suggested way back would also be a good approach.

[yxlwfds]

pycharm +1

[laike9m]

@sam2khatri Hi Samaksh, Atom and Sublime are not supported as of now. If they're supported, I'll post the updates here.

[shubhamsharma1609]

@laike9m The library seems to be very promising.Kindly provide support for Spyder IDE also.

[laike9m]

Hi Alex, thanks for your feedback. I always expect your input since you're the expert in this area.

now it doesn't even work any more

I noticed that...

I suggest you make an interface that can be used in the browser

Actually this is already possible. The interface is defined using protobuf + gRPC. For web usage, there's gRPC Web. I will write a more descriptive spec later to explain how it works.

Beyond that, I still think the minimal CLI that I suggested way back would also be a good approach.

This is easier than in the previous version, since right now everything is already serialized to JSON. But it all comes down to one problem: there are so many bugs to fix right now and I don't have enough time...

With all respect, I don't agree with the opinion that "editor integrations is the wrong idea". Cyberbrain is trying to picth a brand new idea of variable tracing, it hasn't been achieved by any other debugging tools I've seen. To demonstrate this idea, I need a UI that is usable enough, otherwise people won't even understand what "tracing" means. I agree that your point might be correct from a pure technical perspective, but Cyberbrain needs more than that to succeed, because it is very hard to spread a new idea. Hope that explains it.

Also, you're absolutely correct that it's not scalable to maintain every integration. That's why I only plan to maintain vscode-compatible environments. Hopefully in the future we'll see a PyCharm integration built by the community.

[alexmojaki]

Sorry, I should have made some things clearer.

I figured there was already a web server and such, but I don't know how to use it. I suggest you document it clearly at the forefront. It should be as usable as possible on its own so that everyone finds your tool pleasant to use without a specific editor.

I also thought that a PyCharm plugin would make birdseye so easy and convenient to use that everyone would use it, but it didn't work that way. It was only afterwards that I polished and refined the browser interface and realised how much easier and more effective that was. The PyCharm plugin was still the most convenient, but only by a thin margin.

Make the interfaces that everyone can use your top priority. Make them user friendly and well documented. Then afterwards, editor integrations can be a bonus to help spread the word further.

[alexmojaki]

Also check out the editors and IDEs section of https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/python-developers-survey-2019/

[laike9m]

I see what you mean. The decision of supporting VS Code not web is more of a technical decision.

For tracing to be useful, it's necessary to show source code alongside the trace graph. However, I don't know how to make an "editor like" UI (even if I do, it's gonna take a lot more effort). birdseye shows source code by itself while Cyberbrain doesn't, and that leads to the difference (which all make sense IMHO).

And thanks for posting the survey results. I use PyCharm to develop Cyberbrain too.

For the server interface, it will be documented because I definitely want people to be able to build tools on top of it easily. One thing to note that this interface is subject to change at any time, and that's why I want to wait for it to become more stable before publishing it.

[alexmojaki]

Here's roughly how I think it should look:

I think that would be an improvement over the existing VSCode interface already. It's hard to look at line numbers on their own in the graph diagram and map them to source code. Don't rely on the editor on the side, present the text in the ideal format yourself. Lines not directly relevant to the graph but which still provide valuable context can be shown but with less space and emphasis.

[laike9m]

Thanks for the suggestion, it's a good starting point for building a web version.

It's hard to look at line numbers on their own in the graph diagram and map them to source code.

That's why I have this feature planned:
Allow mutual interaction between source code and the trace graph.

[dstromberg]

Hi folks.

I think as one of the first integrations, if you can call it that, it might be worthwhile to just output graphviz from a standalone version of Cyberbrain. Then if you don't have an integration for your favorite coding environment yet (I like vim+syntastic+jedi!), you could just convert the graphviz to PDF or whatever, using the dot program.

Thanks for the cool idea and cool tool.

[laike9m]

Hi folks.

I think as one of the first integrations, if you can call it that, it might be worthwhile to just output graphviz from a standalone version of Cyberbrain. Then if you don't have an integration for your favorite coding environment yet (I like vim+syntastic+jedi!), you could just convert the graphviz to PDF or whatever, using the dot program.

Thanks for the cool idea and cool tool.

@dstromberg Well, guess what, Graphviz is my first attempt, but it has proved to be not so useful, at lease I'm not satisfied with it. I picked JavaScript (vis-network to be specific) because Cyberbrain needs to have proper user interaction on the trace graph.

[cxapython]

pycharm +1

[themightywolfie]

I don't use VS Code but I use IDEs like Atom and Sublime Text, will this be compatible with those just by installing the Python package or does it compulsorily need an extension?

[nyngwang]

Oops! Is this thread still alive? If this can be opened in the browser then I hope you could support neovim.

[laike9m]

@nyngwang Unfortunately we currently uses vscode's API, so probably won't be able to support neovim

[younger-1]

Wish anyone could help for (neo)vim users.
These may be useful:
neovim: https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim
vim: https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm

[nyngwang]

@younger-1 Thanks for your kindly sharing, but I did try firenvim before and didn't like it.

[sundyloveme]

pycharm + 1

[stucash]

I actually come from Logseq's opencollective page and I found this fabulous tool. Diving in I found that there's only VSCode support. I'd hope this tool comes to PyCharm as it is exclusively a python tool anyway (to the very least, VSCode and PyCharm should be 50/50 in terms of number of users, it makes sense to me to support these 2 platforms primarily). If it's very tight in schedule, probably you could promote the opencollective page for people to donate; if someone with expertise (@alexmojaki) has spent good hours building a third party plugin for PyCharm but to no avail, an official plugin probably is something to consider.
All the best!

[laike9m]

Hi all, sorry for not providing any update for so long. I stopped the development due to shifting my focus to daily work for the past two years. Good news is, I'm planning to restart the development next year, and rewrite the whole frontend.

My current (super early) plan is to move away from VS Code, not only because this will enable more users to use it, but I also found myself spending a ton of time working on the Python <-> Js interaction, which is tedious, buggy, and annoying.

I'm hoping to find a cross-platform, Python-native UI framework that I can use as the foundation. Maybe Flet, or Shiny, or Reflex, or something else. My biggest concern is not being able to find a good graph library like vis-network, but we'll see. If you know anything that may work, please let me know and I'm happy to take a look.