Remove expander for strings in Visual D

[Michelle Long]

On Friday, 26 October 2018 at 06:36:05 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>
>
> On 26/10/2018 02:29, Michelle Long wrote:
>> Strings have an expander and are treated like arrays but they 
>> don't have to be. The string is already shown in the value and 
>> there is the text viewer for them. The expander just gets in 
>> the way.
>
> The array display can also be helpful for some lowlevel code 
> that iterates over the string, especially if there multi-byte 
> characters in a string. I don't think having the option to 
> expand the string is too distractive.

I thought I already replied to this, oh well...

The problem is that sometimes one might click on the expander and 
it expands far too much. It most cases it is not needed.

Maybe you could make it an option(have an options page for things 
like this that tweak things for personal taste) that you can add 
over time that doesn't get in the way of normal functionality.

VS has a memory window for looking at arrays in a more meaningful 
way which is nearly just as easy to use.

Since 95%+ of the time one doesn't need to look at the character 
data of a string(since it's a string and not a byte array), the 
expenders are not needed. In most of the other cases the memory 
window could be used. If anyone is needed such behavior 
consistently then it can be enabled(or disabled, I don't care 
about default behavior as long as I can override it).

The goal is to make the debugging experience easy nice as 
possible so it is not so frustrating. Everyone is different and 
has different needs.