Viewing a package's settings should activate it

[lee-dohm]

See this post on Discuss for full details.

Repro Steps

1. Create a package that has activationCommands set
2. Add a config schema to the package
3. Launch Atom
4. Open Settings View with Cmd+,
5. Navigate to the package's settings

Expected: To see the configured default settings
Actual: The package's settings are blank

[winstliu]

👍, ran into this when trying to create my own package. Was really confused as to why I couldn't get settings to show up inside the Settings View.

[braver]

Possibly related to #347?

[thedaniel]

Given that packages can and do change the editor state significantly on activation, we probably can't just activate them when their settings are viewed.

[dschwen]

I don't see why atom couldn't just require the main package file, inspect the config member, but not run activate. Do we really have packages where the mere loading without actual initialization through activate takes a long time?

[moxley]

@dschwen: I agree that it seems odd that the config property cannot be inspected without also calling activate. However, to your point about taking a long time to initialize, I commented out the body of activate in my package so that it does nothing, then reloaded Atom, and Atom reported that it took 250ms to load my package. That is compared to 25ms it took to load the ascii-art tutorial package. Maybe the main class isn't the ideal place to put the config. It's declarative code, and it's a standard object recognized by Atom, so it follows that it should live in a json or cson file, like other such declarative code.

[dschwen]

Sure, a separate cson file would be great. I was just hoping some less invasive change could be made, that didn't require updating all packages. What about caching the config defaults? And lazily check if the cache needs to be updated using a web worker after startup?

[Arcath]

@thedaniel My pull request uses Package.activateConfig() which doesn't activate the whole package saving settings-view from being the cause of random behaviour as packages get activated left right an centre.

[thedaniel]

I left a comment re: @Arcath's use of activateConfig() over on #371