Hi! I’m a self-taught novice programmer trying to write a macro in javascript for ImageJ. I’ve built a program that I think works, but trying to debug it without a proper debugger has been hell. I’m a hair away from just giving up and rewriting the whole thing in the program’s native macro language. I looked online and it seems like I should be able to set up a debugging environment in Visual Studio Code, but I couldn’t find any guide for doing that specifically for ImageJ. I use Visual Studio Code to write my javascript, but any advice on any platform or even just what I need to find to get started would be helpful. Thank you!
What makes you think the macro works? What are you debugging if there are no bugs that you’ve identified?
Trust me, I’m far from the delusion that I can write a program that does the things I want it to on the first try haha. By “I think it works” I mean that the code is to the point where at least visually I can’t detect any obvious issues and VSC isn’t throwing up any red flags, either. But when I try to run the program, it throws an error message and a line number, which I have to take back to VSC and edit blindly without any view of the variables and context. Swapping back and forth is becoming a huge headache. A debugger, even one as simple as just installing the ImageJ package into VSC(don’t know how to do this) and telling me when I’m calling a function wrong, would be massively helpful.
It looks like you can debug Nashorn JavaScript using IntelliJ IDEA
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2014/03/debugger-for-jdk8s-nashorn-javascript-in-intellij-idea-13-1/
Thank you so much! This is incredibly helpful.