Inspiring

Question

Are people just not using the broken "UXP developer tools?"

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
June 23, 2025
2 replies
1589 views

I’m writing a plug-in for InDesign, but I keep losing my JS code changes when I close the tool or ID crashes.

But in the editor, the code is marked as dirty when I make changes; and then that’s cleared when I “save” it. But if I look at the JS file on disk (using the dev tool’s “Open folder” command), it doesn’t reflect my changes.

There’s no “show in Explorer” option in the context menu in the left pane of the UXP tool, and “Copy link address” doesn’t work; it just copies the filename, not the path. And the “Filesystem” tab is useless: It contains nothing, and the “add folder to workspace” button does nothing.

So… are people just using some other tool and still littering their code with alerts to debug?

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Philip Buckley

Participating Frequently

Hi,

I have posted a reply to your message in the Creative Cloud Developers Forum . . . assuming that it is you using "OscarG" as a username there! 😉

Philip

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Yeah I wish Adobe would consolidate all of its "accounts." Oh well!

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Philip Buckley

Participating Frequently

Hi Thomas,

There are two tabs at the top – Developer Workspace and Playground. I've never used the Playground tab, but I use the Developer Workspace tab all the time – to load, watch, and debug the plugins I am developing. I'm creating UXP plugins for InDesign. In my experience the UXP Developer Tools program works fine. I'm wondering how you have things set up and what your expectations of the program are.

Philip

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Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Philip,

Thanks for the reply. I'm using Developer Workspace also.

My expectations are to do exactly what you're doing. But the editor is not saving the code, despite claiming to.

If I edit something and press Save, I expect it to do so.

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Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

So what is it that you want from console.log that it doesn't give you? As I mentioned, for me the console.log in UXP Developer Tools constantly throws up error messges as I write code and make mistakes – missplaced brackes, undefined variables, all the things that you do when you type too fast! 😉 And the error messages tell me where I've made the mistake. I'll sometimes delberately write to the console if, for instance, I want to check what the value of something is. So I can't really think what else I'd want console.log to do?

That's in the Developer Tools. Console logging goes nowhere in a stand-alone script.

I've just verified that "watch" doesn't work either. I make changes to the code in VS Code, and it's not reflected in Developer Tools. Attempting to reload it there manually usually locks up InDesign, so ID has to be force-quit. Good times.

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