One of the great things about being a developer is finding flow. It’s that feeling when you’re cranking out code, accomplishing one task after another, and time seems to fade into the background - you’re in the zone. However, a few things can really disrupt your flow, and one of the biggest culprits is your development environment.

If your syntax highlighting doesn’t work, or your environment slows you down, productivity takes a hit. That’s why one of the best things any coder can do is optimize their development environment for efficiency.

In FileMaker, there’s no traditional “code editor” per se. Instead, there’s a dialog box called the Calculation dialog box - sometimes labeled Specify Calculation or Edit Expression, depending on the context. Regardless of the name, this one dialog is where you’ll spend most of your time coding. The goal, then, is to make this area - and the Script Workspace (known as ScriptMaker for those who remember the early days) - as efficient as possible.

In this video, I walk through the tools I use to make the FileMaker environment as coding-friendly and efficient as possible.

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