New Flutter tooling releases -- v23 now available!
Nilay Yener
Preview Dart 2: The meaning of the preview Dart 2 setting for both IntelliJ and VS Code has been updated to now takes three separate values: it lets you accept the Flutter SDK default, set preview Dart 2 to be explicitly enabled, or set to it to be disabled.
IntelliJ General improvements
For IntelliJ 2017.3 and Android Studio 3.1 and later, we now show Material icons and colors in code completion. This makes it much easier to explore the available icons for your app:
Flutter Inspector: The work on the Inspector this release focused on stability and polish improvements. Additionally, the Inspector now supports inspecting multiple running apps at the same time.
Flutter Outline: This release moves the Outline view out behind an experimental flag - it’s now enabled and available by default. There have been several UI polish improvements, and we’ve changed the default for the filter in the Outline view to have it only show widget nodes by default. We’ve also added an 'Extract method' refactoring, to help you reduce the size of a build() method by pulling parts of it out into separate methods.
Android Studio: We now support Android Studio 3.1! Bugs fixes here included addressing an issue where Android Studio was indexing frequently.
VS Code Dart-Code New Features
Flutter Test: Basic support for flutter test has been added. If you launch a file (by pressing F5 with no launch config, or by setting program in your launch config) that is inside the test folder of a Flutter project, the script will be run using flutter run. Output will appear in the Debug Console pane. All debugging functionality (breakpoints, etc.) should work as normal.
Projects in Sub-Folders: When projects are found in sub-folders you will now be prompted to mark them as Workspace folders. This will allow Dart Code to better understand which folders are projects when detecting which debugger to run when pressing F5.
For the full changelog for Dart Code v2.11 see the Dart Code website.
IntelliJ Experimental features!
We’ve added lots of new experimental features in this release. They’re behind opt-in flags to allow us to spend a bit more time on development as well as to allow us to get early feedback.
Live memory usage: We’ve added a small sparkline of the memory used by your app. This is available in the toolbar of the Inspector view:
Note that the memory used by your application in debug mode will be larger than in a release build of your application. You can run your app in profile mode to get a more accurate sense of the release build memory usage.
Format on save: We’ve added the ability to format and organize imports on save, an often requested feature.
Live preview of the selected widget: We can now show a live preview of the layout of your widget in the Outline view, with the preview updated as you type. This is very experimental, and will be an area of active development and iteration. We’ll follow up with a medium.com article on how to enable this and use it to preview your widgets (and, will include some background about the technology that powers it).
See this wiki page for some brief instructions about how to enable and use the preview view.