This past week I’ve been trying to play around with the pandora plugin and analyze the codebase. At least, that was the plan. Instead, I’ve been trying to get the plugin to actually load.

What I thought I’d have done by now is install the plugin, poke around the code, and sketch out the tabs implementation for the issue. But, so far I’ve been debugging why it wouldn’t load.

I grabbed the latest release of Pandora, dropped it into a test project, enabled it in the plugins menu, and was immediately greeted with this lovely wall of errors:

ERROR: res://addons/pandora/model/entity. gd:606 - Parse Error:  Identifier "Pandora" not declared in the current scope.
ERROR: res://addons/pandora/model/entity.gd:622 - Parse Error: Identifier "Pandora" not declared in the current scope.
ERROR: res://addons/pandora/model/entity.gd:627 - Parse Error: Identifier "Pandora" not declared in the current scope.
...
(and about 50 more just like it)

This is apparently a known problem in Godot plugins, but it’s also something that can break depending on your Godot version. I’m using 4.5.1, and something about how it loads plugins must have triggered this issue.

So far now, I need to work directly with the source repository instead of using a release. The repo has the correct project configuration already set up.

So, after setting that up and actually using the plugin, this is what you see:

As you can see, all the categories show up in a tree view on the left side of the app. If you have a lot of categories, the tree gets long and cluttered and involves a lot of scrolling. So now I need to add a toggleable setting to make these categories show up as tabs, similar to VSCode:

From analyzing the code, what I understand so far is that clicking "Create Category" calls Pandora.create_category(), and the tree updates. Settings can be modified in pandora_settings.gd, so I’ll need to research how to add a toggle setting for switching to tabs. To make the tabs appear, this is where it’s more involved. I will need to figure out how to modify the scene structure to show tabs instead of the tree, keeping in mind the additional child nodes will need to be visible as well.

If all goes well, this new feature shouldn’t be too difficult to implement.