ESTK CS4 Crashes for Preferences > Fonts & Colors

[mac0ward]

Hello,

I'm doing a lot of work in the Extendscript Toolkit. I want to change the font size, but every time I go into preferences and select 'Fonts and Colors', it crashes. The other preferences pages work fine. What gives? I've even reinstalled Photoshop with the ESTK. No luck.

[jeffbottom]

yes, this is still an issue 8 years later...

every 6 months or so I try and tackle it, spent most of this morning trying everything short of a fresh OS X install, all to no avail...

so boring. all i want is Courier as my coding font, is it really that hard ?

Adobe ?

[Trevor:]

Hi Jeff,

I see from the "more like this" links on the side that this issue bothers you.

There are many excellent text editors for developing (and executing) scripts in including free one, there's even Brackets if you are addicted to Adobe products.

So why insist on using one of the worst products you can get your hands on.

Just my opinion which people are probably pretty sick of hearing by now!

Trevor

[JJMack]

Trevorׅ  wrote

There are many excellent text editors for developing (and executing) scripts in including free one,

May I ask what you use Trevor.

[Trevor:]

Sublime Text

[Trevor:]

I think you have to be careful how you insult abandonware 🙂

[jeffbottom]

yeah, I realise ESTK is not exactly great but the only coding I really do is for Adobe apps (almost exclusively After effects) and being able to run and bug code directly from the editor is indispensable. Unless I'm mistaken I can't do that from another editor like sublime text right ?

"abandonware", I like it. but why is .jsx ?

[oliverIntergrafika]

We can use a well hacked Chrome to remote debug html panel virtual machines, it is possible to run .jsx from the panels and capture their output to Chrome's console. But, this could be a separate topic. (The debugging console does not work on Chrome 55 Canary 64bit · Issue #78 · Adobe-CEP/CEP-Resources ... ) But Jeff You are right: If You want to write, run, debug, profile .jsx scripts, a well written and maintained ESTK could be valuable.

I feel .jsx abandonware because since I started programming Photoshop 2 years ago, nothing changed in it's ultra slow and ancient javascript engine. The PS DOM object structure is unfinished. I estimate about 45% completeness. But assume that some tooth fairy finishing it's DOM overnight, we would still have a steamroller to race.

I am refactoring/migrating my objects/methods to HTML Panel JavaScript, and leaving only the required minimum in the .jsx files.

[Trevor:]

oliverIntergrafika  wrote

....
But Jeff You are right: If You want to write, run, debug, profile .jsx scripts, a well written and maintained ESTK could be valuable.

jeffbottom wrote

Unless I'm mistaken I can't do that from another editor like sublime text right ?

"abandonware", I like it. but why is .jsx ?

I could write a very lot on this but I just don't have time now.

Regarding .jsx as noted, archaic.

We are currently in 2017 the current EMCA (JS) version is 7

.jsx works on version 3. Version 3 was made in the previous millennium 1999.

ECMAScript - Wikipedia

It is really slow.

What does really slow mean? I would say the jsx engine is about 500 times slower than the "Modern" HTML engine.

So yes when a new feature gets added to the DOM if one is lucky it will get "slopped" into the scripting dictionary (Some apps are luckier than others) so it's not really abandoned but it's really really malnourished.

Regarding the ESTK I think that is more abandoned. Even with Brackets which was created by Adobe, they came to the conclusion that the code should be turned over to open source so it can be maintained properly by a huge community.

One has to realize that to Adobe scripting and developers community is tiny in comparison to the overall developers community and that tools used by the massive current developers community are going to be way better than something that was created for a tiny group of people.

Can one run and debug jsx from outside the ESTK?

Sure thing. See Re: Illustrator Sublime Extension Woes for some guidance. There are many methods of various complexities.

Note, that my opinion is that using the console is not a good way to debug. Log, log and log, see logging with a smile by yours truly. I need to update the script there a bit, I'll try do it in the next week or 2 but as it is it works well.

There are packages for both Brackets and ST for HTML panels, probably for Atom also.

Even you for some reason you can't run the script from ST or whatever then just for the purpose of typing and editing the script it's worth using not the ESTK. The professional free plugins available are vast. If one just tries out something for an hour or 2 then you might not see too much but if one puts some time into it and learning what the professionals are doing then one will just gain from it.

HTH

Trevor

[jeffbottom]

hey Trevor thanks for the info, it's quite depressing to hear .jsx is running 500x slower than it could be ... jeepers. To be honest most of the stuff I'm doing is a long way from anything like professional development, mainly workflow scripts to automate aspects of after effects, though I had a look at Sublime Text and it seems pretty sweet.

* just incase anyone finds their way to this thread with the same problem I did find a WORKAROUND. I opened ESTK on a windows machine, changed the font settings and then copied the preferences file into the Mac directory. Eh voila, new font and colour settings. super clunky but it works. One weirdness was that the "Menlo" font which I really like from seeing it in textwrangler doesn't seem to work in ESTK for some reason. sigh.

[oliverIntergrafika]

I think ESTK is abandonware like .jsx.

I am using it if I need to peek into DOM structure, log something fast to the console, or check F1 for object and methods.

That default font is really awful, and impossible to set the colors also.