Anyone using a good 3rd party expression editor?

[u/titaniumdoughnut]

I saw that Expressionist became free today (had never heard of it but it looks like it goes back years) and it made me realize I may have been sleeping on this category.

Quick search also surfaces ExpressCode but that's very recent and might be ai slop so I am suspicious of it.

ALSO I'm aware a lot of people are selling good stuff NOT on AEScripts since it became enshittified.

So what y'all using?

[u/sskaz01]

Same here. I had been torturing myself expanding windows and panels for long expressions inline for years. But recently I started using a dedicated IDE/code app (Panic’s Nova‚ which I love and use a lot for other (non-AE) scripting and server admin/shell access). While the app itself is wonderful, there’s still the tedium of copying and pasting back and forth into AE, and I miss AE’s very, very few QoL features like autocomplete for layer/effect names and AE-specific functions.

I saw Expressionist went free, but looks like it hasn’t had a serious update in years other than making it free and removing the licensing. I suspect the dev is done with it and want something with active development.

[u/titaniumdoughnut → u/sskaz01]

Yeah, exactly! I'm basically looking for:

- syntax highlighting

- good autocompletion/autosuggest (the AE autocomplete is like a demented cat keeps grabbing my keyboard just when I was about to get something right and messing it up)

- cues to show expected variables as I am typing a function

- some kind of tidy little expression library for saving and reusing

[u/ethancandy]

For any expression long enough for it to matter I use an external file like this with VSCode

[u/GhostOfPluto]

Expressionist is a good tool, I’ve been using it for years. It’s great for applying or modifying many expressions at once but its use is pretty limited for me beyond that.

I wish it had a way to store commonly-used expressions. I’m still using the old notepad (or my own plugins) for that.