I kind of wish I could toggle the editor into a free-form editor that just gives me syntax highlighting errors

[pbiggar]

A user says:

I played with Dark for a while, but I quickly ran into a lot of fights with the editor where it would automatically add statements inside others when I wanted them "dedented" and spent so much time trying to make my first few endpoints fighting the functionality of the code editor that I kind of missed out on the functionality and gave up. I kind of wish I could toggle the editor into a free-form editor that just gives me syntax highlighting errors until either I get a better knack for the language so I don't get trapped in the editor, or the editor is better at telling me what I should do instead.

That's the most honest feedback I can give based on my time in Dark so far, but I'll jump into it some more and hopefully give better feedback on deeper aspects of the tool. For what it's worth, it felt really gratifying to see my first REST response just work, and then see the requests come in as little nuggets in the UI so I could see the request/response there. That part worked great! :)

Follow up:

I wanted to do some name validation so I think I started with an if and maybe I had wanted two conditions, but then changed my mind. But I can't remove this outer if, and it's not obvious to me how to move the stuff inside out. So I just felt like I was spending tens of minutes trying to tell the editor what I wanted the text to say, which is why I kind of wish I could jump into some kind of free text mode and just quickly delete the parts I don't want. It just feels a bit like I'm fighting it when I hit Delete on something I don't want and nothing happens. Related, when I hit Enter to create empty lines, it just inserts a bunch of empty "let _ =" in a row. :(

To put it more bluntly, the editor is telling me I'm wrong in so many ways that I feel I'm being a bit dumb...

Sorry for focusing on these negative parts but since I encountered it so early on and it's preventing me from becoming an active user, it seems like the most useful information I can give at the moment.