Discussing UI of the Plugin Monitor

Development
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The UI for the Resource Usage Monitor for Joplin is a part of the GSoC 2024 project titled Plugin Resource Usage Monitor for Joplin Desktop. This aims to accurately display the near real-time resource usage metrics in the Joplin app for Plugins, as well as help the users and developers to identify resource heavy plugins.

Here is a very rough initial impression of the place where the resource monitor sits.

pluginmonitor
pluginmonitor2200×1320 171 KB

I would like to get an opinion of the community on the UI on the following points:

  • If you would like to see any graphs or visual charts ?
  • Are performance/health indicators necessary, if yes, then in what way (text, icons or color coded) ?
  • What are some other useful metrics ?
  • Can the monitor be accomodated elsewhere? (For example, a simple metric below each plugin box, a whole new screen in the config menu, etc.)
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A graph for CPU usage and memory would be useful I think.

Any reason not to put this monitor in a separate window? Where you put it there is a config screen, that's not where we'd normally put debug tools.

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I think this should be displayed in a separate window so that you can do some actions in the plugin and also monitor current values. Not just total and peak.

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I agree with the above suggestions.

If Joplin slows down, I would want to open the monitor ASAP to analyze/kill processes and screenshot graphs if needed. Having the monitor open before Joplin slows down would be even more helpful.

As for opening the monitor, Help > Open Plugin Monitor with a keyboard shortcut would require much fewer clicks, if any.

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I tried opening a new window, it seems to work well, however, there is a question -
The Plugin Monitor is like an optional or even unnecessary feature for those who do not use plugins except the default. Also, if we are spawning a renderer process for displaying the plugin monitor, will it be better if I move the pluginMonitor core to another plugin altogether that may be made available for download ?

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If you can make it a plugin that would be better, but I don't know if that's possible. If not possible it's also ok to have it built-in

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For now, I think I will implement this as a native feature instead of a plugin, for that purpose, I need to use some package to generate graphs in the UI. I believe I have seen something similar in the forum sometime ago, but couldn't find it by searching. So I wanted to know if there is any package currently being used for graph/chart generation, or if there is any recommendation otherwise.

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Do you have any suggestions for the shortcut key? I found that browsers like chrome and firefox use the shortcut Shift + Esc to spawn a process metric window for the individual processes. I was thinking we could use the same, it doesn't conflict with any other accelerator in the app, though I am not sure about the plugins.

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Agreed with using Shift+Esc to match browser equivalents.

No plugin I use conflicts with it. I suspect no plugin uses it. If any do, they should use a different shortcut.

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