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?

P

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!

P

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

T

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.

H

Hauke-H

New Participant

It was originally just a script, but the "developer tools" don't envision this and there's no apparent way to debug a stand-alone script.

The code will run in either environment. Once I have it refined enough, I might distribute it to my team as a plug-in. At this point I created a new plug-in using the dev tool, copied my script into main.js, and opened the generated folder in VS Code. So I can debug and will not rely on the dysfunctional "editor."

It's really irritating that there's no way to run the code in the debugger. You can pause and stop, but not run. WTH?

A bit late, but as it seems that nobody has answered about how to debug standalone scripts, I'd like to add that. In the UDT I click on the dot matrix in the upper left to bring up a side panel, where running Adobe apps are listed. I click on "Debug Script" and get a drop are, where I can drop my uxp script file.

I find this a bit cumbersome, because I have to drop again for each run, but it works.

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