13th April 2026
The Big Clean Up
I had a chance to return to Orsn last week. It's been a while, so I did a Big Clean Up, sorting all methods and import statements alphabetically, and labelling my Vue component sections consistently. Although I've been using IntelliJ for some years I haven't used the Bookmarks feature in the past. It's very useful, in conjunction with the minimap feature ('CodeGlance Pro' plugin), which gives a graphical overview of a given file, and includes text links to bookmarked lines.
This was also a good opportunity, as I was refamiliarising myself with some of the code, to document tricky features where the workings were not immediately obvious, in particular component structures. Bringing a fresh eye also prompted some refactoring of variable and function names for clarity. As a consequence I was able to fix some issues with my implementation of ProseMirror inline menus.
My aim is to include jsdoc documentation in the code base for important functionality, but for my own reference I've also been creating separate descriptive Markdown files where I visualise the component structures of key pages, and detail where the responsibilities for data flow and updates lie. This is the kind of thing certain efficient programmers do at the start of their development cycle. Doing it retrospectively will have to suffice in this case. For me it is now essential as the codebase is large and there is a tendency to solve problems and move on, so the detail of implementation can become muddied without careful write-ups.
I started out hoping to use Mermaid for creating Markdown visualisations, but it turns out that creating simple wireframe diagrams with blocks and nested blocks, is not yet one of its strengths. After wrestling with some buggy rendering of simple panel layouts, I gave up on it and looked for alternatives. I was pleased to find an IntelliJ plugin which opens the drawio editor within the IDE, so I was able to draw and edit my simple diagrams directly as SVG files, and embed them in my MD documentation.
I'm still thinking about supporting Mermaid diagrams in Orsn, however: it does seem effective for other use cases.
Contact
Find me on the fediverse (Mastodon) @Lemmy@post.lurk.org, or send an email to: info [at] orsn.io