Recently we got a Quick Open feature (https://devforum.roblox.com/t/quickest-open-in-the-west/44010) and it’s been great, I’ve been pressing Ctrl + P
all day and every day. While the feature is really really good I feel like it’s just a few tweaks away from being perfect. Below is my wish list.
Performance
As a developer with a large game (well over 1k scripts, well over 410k instances) the searching is pretty slow. Not only can search results take a few seconds to populate but typing in the search bar can be a very stuttery and slow process. It’s hard to get the feel of it from the video below, but hopefully it provides a little insight.
It’s roughly inline with how fast the Explorer filter is but being used in the context of “jumping from script to script” it’s a pretty guaranteed slowdown in productivity. I find myself often going back to clicking around the Explorer if a script is “near by” instead of using Quick Open since it’s only a tiny bit slower but far less sluggish feeling.
If Roblox were to address this it would mean the feature wouldn’t just be the quickest open in the west, it’d make it the quickest open ever. Period. Being able to cache object locations (at the very least for scripts) and refresh that cache (similar to the search all refresh) button would be an acceptable speed solution. Manual refreshes for super speed searching is a fair trade off.
Ergonomics
As a developer I often rely on keyboard shortcuts and auto-fill/complete systems to speed up my typing. Time management is a huge part of my workflow and a large portion of that task is making sure my setup is as ergonomic as possible. All of my key binds are set up to be accessible from where I keep my hands when typing. Arrow keys are not where I keep my hands.
Currently the only two ways to navigate the Quick Open results list with my mouse or by using the arrow keys. While arrow keys give full nav control over the list they require me to displace my hand to a position that inhibits my ability to quickly returning to typing. 90% of the time when I’m navigating this list I’m only going to be pressing the down arrow key and then Enter once I reach my target.
If Roblox were to allow the Tab key to act as a down arrow press it would speed this process up by a huge margin. The combo of Ctrl + P
, TAB
and Enter
is a far faster one for than Ctrl + P
, Down/Up
, Enter
. The script editor experience has come a long way in recent months and this would make it an even smoother experience.
Size and Position
As a developer my screen real estate is at a premium. I try and layer any windows I can on top of less used ones, and I often resort to opening and closing rarely used windows. This new Quick Open window is big. Really big.
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Instance names have a huge amount of space given to them. I can’t speak for everybody but I try and keep my instance names short and to the point. Even in cases where I might need longer names I don’t think I’d ever have a good use for all the space given to the Name portion of the list.
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Instance paths already seem to cut a good amount of the fat out but they still have a lot of space left over. The trimmed paths are the perfect length, they just seem kinda silly floating so far away from the Instance name.
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The “Recent” tag being alone on the far right side is pretty easy to miss. It’s a helpful bit of information that’s hard to take in right away since there is so much space to observe. Without selecting objects it can be difficult to connect to any specific Instance since it’s so far away from any other Instance related UI.
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“Show More” feels more like a bug. By default it doesn’t extend the list to the bottom of the screen, instead it just displays the “button” / Show More text and a lot of empty space below it. It’s only once you click Show More that the space properly fills up and the Show More button (if there is still more to see) moves to the bottom of the window.
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The inability to resize and move the window really hurts and it’s default position on the top of the screen and overlapping docked windows is a bit of an eye strain.
If Roblox were to address these sizing and positioning issues it would help reduce a lot of the awkwardness of the feature. It’s functionally brilliant but visually it’s always just “in the way” and that doesn’t suit something designed to be frequently popping on and off your screen.
Quick Open is a strong feature for power users that is 90% of the way to being perfect. If Roblox were to address all the pain points and requests outlined in this thread it would fill in that last 10% and solve a problem developers have been going to other IDEs to fix for a while now.