I’ve never developed an extension before, so much of this is new to me; and I’m finding the docs a touch lacking. I’ve been trying to learn by looking at the repos of other extension projects, and I’ve at least been able to get a ‘Hello world’ printed to the extension console. That’s where I’m currently stuck however.
Within exports.activate = function..., I want to test when there is text change in the editor, so in the activate function, I have:
But that is throwing an undefined error on the nova object. It appears to me from the docs and other repos that nova is available globally and not something I need to import directly in the project file to call. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
While nova should be available anywhere, it does not have a specific textEditor element.
Since each “window” can have multiple text files open, that window is considered a Workspace. With that Workspace, you could try something like nova.workspace.activeTextEditor which will only return the current editor. But, if you really want to interact with assigning a callback to the onDidChange, you may need to do something else:
const MinifierService = require("./minifier.js");
exports.activate = function() {
const Minifier = new MinifierService();
nova.workspace.onDidAddTextEditor((editor) => {
return editor.onWillSave(Minifier.minifyOnSave.bind(Minifier));
});
}
exports.deactivate = function() {
// Clean up state before the extension is deactivated
}
So when the extension activates, it will that assign an event listener that triggers whenever a text editor is opened in the workspace. The onDidAddTextEditor will pass editor which is the TextEditor object you are looking for. Now, in that listener, I have it assign onWillSave to call the Minifier to do it’s stuff. That’s where you may want to do something with the onDidChange there instead.
I agree, learning to make extensions is sometimes easier to take a look at other extensions than the current documentation.
In case you didn’t know, you can also go into Extensions → Extensions Library… and then right-click on an extension and Show in Finder. And then open that folder in Nova, and poke around at the code.
