Module Tracy Debugger

[adrian]

Hi @bernhard - I have upped them to 9999 here locally - I'll commit it to the next version.

Hi @rick - that might be possible, but I am curious about why you want this - for me it's about quickly and temporarily getting every Tracy related hidden so I can see what's behind on the main page content. 

[rick]

When I have a panel maximized, sometimes the 3 or 4 lines of the tracy bar cover some content. It's no biggie, I just expected the panel to remain in view and surprised me when it kept closing after minimizing the toolbar.

 

[adrian]

On 8/10/2018 at 11:24 AM, rick said:

When I have a panel maximized, sometimes the 3 or 4 lines of the tracy bar cover some content. It's no biggie, I just expected the panel to remain in view and surprised me when it kept closing after minimizing the toolbar.

Typically the simple solution for this would be to drag the Tracy debug bar out of the way - this will work so long as you don't have the "Fixed Position" option checked in the config settings.

 

[adrian]

Hi everyone - @netcarver has mentioned to me that he's not a fan of some of the ambiguity of the icon colors in the debug bar - mostly the blue for the System Info icon and the PW pink color used by the PW Info and Captain Hook panels, and the purple used by the PHP Info panel. I have quickly mocked up a version where these are all grey:

He wanted me to poll you guys to get some input on this change and also any other changes you might like to see. 

In general the idea with icon colors is:

grey - no significance
green - everything ok - no attention needed
orange - warning or attention to a new entry/item of interest
red - warning, fail, or something else that you should be aware of

So please post your thoughts - what do you think can be done to make it look cleaner and also more meaningful/useful?

Thanks!

[Robin S]

1 hour ago, adrian said:

In general the idea with icon colors is:

grey - no significance
green - everything ok - no attention needed
orange - warning or attention to a new entry/item of interest
red - warning, fail, or something else that you should be aware of

I haven't found the icons ambiguous so far, but the colour scheme you're suggesting sounds like it would be a good enhancement.

[bernhard]

7 hours ago, Robin S said:

I haven't found the icons ambiguous so far, but the colour scheme you're suggesting sounds like it would be a good enhancement.

+1

[netcarver]

Just to clarify my request to Adrian, it's not the icons that I'm finding ambiguous - there's nothing wrong with them IMO - it's what the colours are signalling in the current version of Tracy that I find a little confusing.

This is what I'm trying to avoid - particularly the part between 24 and 43 seconds...

Here's the current state of play...

To me - with my now aging eyes - the colours of...

• 2, 5 & 7 seem to be signalling an error condition or something that needs my attention and that this icon could be another colour when the error is sorted out.
• 3, D & H are warning me of something and these icons could be another colour at other times.
• 4, 6, 8, 9, A, (all the green ones) have no error - but they could have warnings or errors at other times.
• All the grey ones are - well, I don't know - are they OK? Or Off? Or just buttons to press when I need them?
• 1 & F are signalling something else to me that's different to all the above.

Whilst some of the above is correct, I don't think it's clear in the current incarnation.

I also think that the decision to colour some icons green rather than grey when there are no warnings or errors, might, arguably, need revisiting. (For example - I think B (Mail interceptor) and C (Module switcher) would probably be better as Grey in the above if there is no interception or disabling going on.)

Basically I'd like to have Tracy only use non-grey colour signalling to me if there is something that needs my attention or constant reminder. I think that would stop me feeling a little like Richmond from the IT Crowd.

BTW - I'm not dishing Tracy or the work Adrian's put in. I think one of the top modules there are for PW and I'm very pleased that Adrian's produced it and for all the hard work he's put in on it.

Hope that clarifies where I'm coming from,
Steve

 

[szabesz]

13 hours ago, adrian said:

grey - no significance
green - everything ok - no attention needed
orange - warning or attention to a new entry/item of interest
red - warning, fail, or something else that you should be aware of

Sounds great, just one question: how will you decide which "warning color" to use, orange vs red? I guess red should not be used for warnings at all. On the same account: "something else that you should be aware of" will be "fail / error / you-MUST-be-aware-of", right?

[adrian]

I just wanted to clarify that the grey/green/orange/red color scheme is already in place and has been since the beginning of the module. As per my mockup above I am more than happy to make all the icons that don't need this scheme grey instead of PW pink or PHP purple, or blue (the System Info icon). Hopefully we're all good with that change.

7 hours ago, netcarver said:

I also think that the decision to colour some icons green rather than grey when there are no warnings or errors, might, arguably, need revisiting. (For example - I think B (Mail interceptor) and C (Module switcher) would probably be better as Grey in the above if there is no interception or disabling going on.)

Basically I'd like to have Tracy only use non-grey colour signalling to me if there is something that needs my attention or constant reminder. I think that would stop me feeling a little like Richmond from the IT Crowd.

I think this approach of grey instead of green to indicate no attention needed will be fine - I can't currently see any reason not to make this change. 

 

4 hours ago, szabesz said:

just one question: how will you decide which "warning color" to use, orange vs red? I guess red should not be used for warnings at all.

I think there will always be some difficulties in determining what should be orange and what should be red, although I do think that if we get rid of green altogether it will actually be simpler, for example I always felt a bit weird about debug mode set to on resulting in red. I think a new grey / orange only combo is probably much nicer. Orange being a warning that you need to be aware of the fact that it's on and this is a security concern on a live site.

 

8 hours ago, netcarver said:

BTW - I'm not dishing Tracy or the work Adrian's put in. I think one of the top modules there are for PW and I'm very pleased that Adrian's produced it and for all the hard work he's put in on it.

No problem at all - as with most things, Tracy has evolved and wasn't really planned from the beginning, so more than happy to revisit this stuff now and I really appreciate everyone's input.

[adrian]

Also, if there are any icon geeks out there, I'd love some help to revamp the icons on the debug bar - many of them are very ugly ? 

Any takers?

[szabesz]

19 minutes ago, adrian said:

Any takers?

I can do it on a one-by-one basis. Not too much free time these days but if we are not in a hurry... ? 

[adrian]

3 minutes ago, szabesz said:

I can do it on a one-by-one basis. Not too much free time these days but if we are not in a hurry... ? 

Sounds good - I don't think you need to go creating them - probably just need to spend some time looking around for better free ones, but whatever you think would be great.

I think regardless of how you go about creating or finding them we should wait till you have them all ready before committing any changes.

[adrian]

Just the default icons to give you guys an idea, but how's this looking?

Still not sure if Debug Mode icon on should be orange or red?

Perhaps I should check if on local dev or live server and go with grey for the former and red for the latter where it really is important!

[szabesz]

1 hour ago, adrian said:

local dev or live server and go with grey for the former and red for the latter

+1

2 hours ago, adrian said:

Sounds good - I don't think you need to go creating them - probably just need to spend some time looking around for better free ones, but whatever you think would be great.

I think regardless of how you go about creating or finding them we should wait till you have them all ready before committing any changes.

I don wanna reinvent the wheel ? but even free ones should be used as starting points only and most importantly they must look like one family, so that is where most efforts should be put into (besides pleasing the eye, of course...).

Edited August 15, 2018 by szabesz
typo

[adrian]

New version just committed contains all the icon color changes. Mostly it's just consolidating the default color to grey and changing a few instances of when orange (WARN) vs red (ALERT) is used.

Let me know if you find anything I have missed or any inconsistencies.

 

[bernhard]

thanks - already using it and i like it! ? 

[adrian]

4 minutes ago, bernhard said:

thanks - already using it and i like it! ? 

Thanks!

Also, just an FYI that your bdb and db 999 has been changed to 9999 in that version.

[bernhard]

1 minute ago, adrian said:

Also, just an FYI that your bdb and db 999 has been changed to 9999 in that version.

Thank you. Actually I came up with a somewhat different idea. I had to debug something yesterday and needed ['debugInfo' => false] several times. In fact I need it that often that I can even remember it by heart ? 

My Idea: What if we had a bdv() method instead of bdb, meaning barDumpVerbose() that has a limit of 9999 AND debuginfo set to false?

[adrian]

1 minute ago, bernhard said:

Thank you. Actually I came up with a somewhat different idea. I had to debug something yesterday and needed ['debugInfo' => false] several times. In fact I need it that often that I can even remember it by heart ? 

My Idea: What if we had a bdv() method instead of bdb, meaning barDumpVerbose() that has a limit of 9999 AND debuginfo set to false?

I am getting a little annoyed with the debugInfo output myself actually - there are lots of holes in it's output - there is a bit of a discussion about it here: https://github.com/processwire/processwire-issues/issues/575 but it would be a lot of work for Ryan to go through all of PW and set this up properly. 

Of course there is a config setting to make the default behavior show the full PW object, but there are times when the debugInfo output is better/easier.

I mentioned above somewhere that I was thinking about having an option to dump both versions automatically with any dump/bardump call - best of both worlds. What do you think about this as an alternative?

Not saying I don't like the verbose idea - I just want to make sure we don't end up with more options than we need. It might also be confusing if you already have debugInfo off by default in the config settings. I don't know - anyone else have any thoughts?

[bernhard]

2 minutes ago, adrian said:

I mentioned above somewhere that I was thinking about having an option to dump both versions automatically with any dump/bardump call - best of both worlds. What do you think about this as an alternative?

not sure how that should look like exactly but it sounds good to me ?

[netcarver]

44 minutes ago, adrian said:

New version just committed contains all the icon color changes. Mostly it's just consolidating the default color to grey and changing a few instances of when orange (WARN) vs red (ALERT) is used.

Let me know if you find anything I have missed or any inconsistencies.

 

Thank you for working on this, Adrian. Looks a lot clearer now.

[szabesz]

5 hours ago, bernhard said:

5 hours ago, adrian said:

I mentioned above somewhere that I was thinking about having an option to dump both versions automatically with any dump/bardump call - best of both worlds. What do you think about this as an alternative?

not sure how that should look like exactly but it sounds good to me ?

Would it mean that we have to click twice to see one of them? First a click on the arrow next to the class name, after that another click on either debugInfo or PW object? Or maybe you "extend" debug info and PW object gets injected into it?

Either way, I think it would be nice to see the id of a Page object without clicking on anything, somewhere between the class name and the arrow. Is that possible?

[tpr]

7 hours ago, adrian said:

New version just committed contains all the icon color changes. Mostly it's just consolidating the default color to grey and changing a few instances of when orange (WARN) vs red (ALERT) is used.

Let me know if you find anything I have missed or any inconsistencies.

 

I think non-grey default icons would look nicer, eg. a darker blue like #354B60 (borrowed from the Uikit admin theme).

It's just a quick devtools preview but for me the current grey is too pale, and rather suggests that those icons are in an "off" state.

To further complicate things, here is an inverted version where the whole bar is blue and icons/texts are white:

I'm not sure this would be better but wanted to share. The biggest advantage would be that it would pop out more from the rest of the page. Orange and red icons would require some brightening to be more visible though.

[adrian]

8 minutes ago, tpr said:

I'm not sure this would be better but wanted to share. The biggest advantage would be that it would pop out more from the rest of the page. Orange and red icons would require some brightening to be more visible though.

I like both actually - the first option really does look a lot nicer than the grey which is pretty awful now that I see the difference ?

The second one is nice but you're right, it will be problematic for the orange and red icons.

Anyone have any thoughts?

 

1 hour ago, szabesz said:

Would it mean that we have to click twice to see one of them? First a click on the arrow next to the class name, after that another click on either debugInfo or PW object? Or maybe you "extend" debug info and PW object gets injected into it?

Either way, I think it would be nice to see the id of a Page object without clicking on anything, somewhere between the class name and the arrow. Is that possible?

Not sure yet - I don't think I can hook into debugInfo though - I'll see what I can do about this sometime soon.

[tpr]

4 minutes ago, adrian said:

grey which is pretty awful now that I see the difference

So did I on my very old designs ?