Support by third-party editors, also for experiments please

Feature Requests
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1

Dear NetLogo team,

Thank you for changing the file-format of nlogox files for the Code tab and Info tab.
Especially the newlines at the start and end are very helpful.

Could you please do the same for the multi-line fields in BehaviorSpace experiments, in particular the “setup commands” and “go commands”?
This would then also carry on to exported experiments. (I hope this is an automatical effect.)

Thank you,
Mark

2

Hi Mark,

This is an interesting idea. There are many such code fields in an .nlogox file, but I’m not really convinced that it’s a good idea to try to support external editing of every single section of the file. My intuition is that a preferable solution would be to improve the experience of editing those sections within the app, so that we don’t need to do too much mangling of the file format to allow people to edit it manually. Is there a specific feature that you feel is missing from the BehaviorSpace edit dialog that you get with an external editor?

Isaac B.

3

Hi Isaac,

The reason I am using other tools on BehaviorSpace experiments is that sometimes I want to make consistent changes over multiple experiments. Then, it is easy to open the (exported) XML file of all experiments and make the changes there.

Another use case is when trying to find differences between experiments. Export each into their own file and then perform a file compare. I remember a case of more than 30 experiments that were all very similar.

For both cases, it helps if all code of (at least) the Setup and Go sections stand on their own lines. For consistency, then please do the same for the other multi-line sections.

Mark