Feedback for long-running processes

[stefanvollmar]

Thanks for a great tool! We use process-palette to trigger conversion from markdown in different formats with Pandoc (via a little Python tool we developed for preprocessing). This works perfectly for HTML conversion which is very fast (<1s). When creating PDF, however, Pandoc uses LaTeX and this can take a few seconds - so our users are irritated when they trigger the conversion and get no immediate feedback. We suggest to have an optional, little notification window as soon as a process is started, which then disappears after a few seconds - similar to the great status mechanism after successful completion of a task. Many thanks in advance!

[morassman]

That's a good suggestion. I'll add an optional notification that will show when the process starts that can be configured in the same way as the other notifications like you suggested.

[morassman]

I've released v0.12.1 with this feature.

You'll see that the notification section is slightly different. One can now choose what type of notifications one wants and optionally more detail for each. If no detail is given then there will still be a notification, but just with the name of the command being shown.

For your use case you can just check the 'Start' box and optionally give more detail if you'd like.

[stefanvollmar]

Thanks a lot - it works beautifully - exactly what we need! - However, there is one bug which is probably easy to fix: it seems that if for one action the working directory is set to "{fileDirAbsPath}" Atom crashes if this is triggered when either a new file (not yet saved), the "Welcome" or "Settings" windows have the focus - if the working directory is set to an absolute path Atom does not crash in these cases.

[morassman]

I've actually encountered it before and I know what is wrong, but it has slipped my mind.

When a tab other than a saved file, such as 'Welcome' and 'Settings', has focus then any file and directory references won't resolve. I'll put in a guard against this. It shouldn't take long :)

Does the command that executes also reference {fileDirAbsPath}? I'm just wondering what to do in such a case. If a file tab doesn't have focus then it probably doesn't make sense to allow such a command to be executed. I think what I should do in that case is to prevent the command from executing and notify the user of it with a warning.

[stefanvollmar]

Indeed we use {fileDirAbsPath} as a commandline argument - at the beginning of our program we test if this path is "sane", i.e. whether this refers to a file in one of the allowed subdirectories of our project. So having any kind of content like "", "UNDEFINED", "undefined" or similar (whenever no "real" file has the focus) would work fine for us and generate a useful warning.

[hg42]

I think, I even had Atom crash when opening settings and closing them again. I often have this situation when testing process-palette. I assume regaining focus doesn't set what is needed by process-palette.

I think, I would simply try/catch everything to prevent any kind of possible problem.