Hello, all!
Has anyone kicked the tires on one of the alpha released of the Arduino Pro IDE? If so what are your impressions?
I know it's still an alpha version and not all features are mature and some are even missing. I am more interested whether it's shaping up to be an improvement over the current version.
Thanx in advance for your feedback.
I've been using it all day every day for the last 1.5 weeks (I'm a beta tester). My impression is that it's not well suited for the average beginner due to having a more complex UI, but that it provides features a more advanced user may be missing in the classic Arduino IDE.
I use VS Code as my standard text editor/IDE for everything other than Arduino sketches. Arduino Pro IDE is based on the same Electron framework as VS Code, and I think even the Theia IDE framework it uses is closely related to VS Code. This means there is more of a consistent experience as I switch back and forth between Arduino Pro IDE and VS Code. This is most useful when it comes to the editor functionality.
One thing that's super awesome, though probably not something appropriate for someone on their first Blink, is the integrated debugger. I haven't actually used it on a project yet, but I'm having a ton of fun playing around with it.
Still pretty "alpha", but also extremely interesting is the Language Server. This provides autocompletion, "Go to definition"/"Peek"/etc. That includes easy access to the library and core code. It has a nice balance of providing more transparency for the things that are often unnecessarily treated as black boxes by even reasonably advanced Arduino users, but in a read-only state so you can't inadvertently introduce confusing bugs while browsing it. Even though there are excellent C++ language servers, my limited experience using them with Arduino code hasn't been great because they don't account for the way the Arduino build system works. The Arduino Pro IDE still uses the professional quality free open source Clangd language server, but allows it to better understand Arduino sketches.
But, does the Pro IDE support the ESP boards?
Yes, it has Boards Manager just like the classic IDE and the ESP8266 and ESP32 boards work just fine.
The one thing you might miss are the optional 3rd party plugins (e.g., EspExceptionDecoder, arduino-esp8266fs-plugin, arduino-esp32fs-plugin). The plugin system is specific to the Processing framework of the classic IDE, so the Pro IDE doesn't have support for these.
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