VS Code migration 3 weeks ago: smashingly successful incl ai (!!!), but having trouble now using the console and loading code

[hawstom]

Hi, CADTutor people! I'd love to share my exciting success. And I need a little help if anybody can give it. I've been programming in AutoLISP for 30 years (remember XTree Gold, the Kelvinator, and that colorful DOS lisp editor?), and I decided to give VS Code yet another try on Oct 4. It was generally successful enough that I decided to commit to it. Then one week ago I happened upon a tutorial for the Copilot AI agent, fired it up with Claude Sonnet (based on hive mind advice), and have been in heaven (and not sleeping) all week; I have a lot of pent-up wish list for open source project CNM from myself and users, and I am getting old and (sometimes) tired. Claude Sonnet under Copilot is amazing!

 

 

But about VS Code: On the whole I am still not looking back, especially with the AI helps and agent. I even like the debugger a lot. And I plan to have ai help me write a little FAS compiler loop. But I don't like the AutoLISP Extension's formatter. And for the life of me I cannot read the minds of the programmers when it comes to loading code. To make matters worse, in the last few days I can figure out how to load code or get the Console to respond. Here's a bug report in case there are great masters about this here:

 

• I used to see blue text in the output (or console?) area at the bottom stating what files were loaded. And I could put expressions in the Console. But now I can't get either one to work.
• I see that there is a green Restart circle at the top and a blue "Load lisp" button on the bottom status bar. The blue status bar and green restart circle indicate that a debug session is running, or in other words that AutoCAD is connected. But it was dismaying to me to learn that the green restart button can load only the file that was active when debugging started. You can't switch to another file and load it without disconnecting and starting a new debug session. You can use the blue "Load lisp" to load other files. But more than half the time that would fail with an incomprehensible message that it could not be loaded because it has changed. "Well, yeah! That's why I want to load it." I see that Autodesk says "Tip: If you need to debug multiple LSP files, it is recommended to load those files with the AutoLISP LOAD function in the LSP file that is in the active editor window before starting a new debug session." So maybe they never could get this to work the way they wanted to. The good news is that if you load from AutoCAD, you still can debug. So all this is not a deal killer.
• I reinstalled the extension. Maybe I need to reinstall VS Code (again).

Any ideas, or just want to talk about my amazing experience with Copilot/Claude?

Tom

Edited 2 hours ago by hawstom