Blog A follow-up: More improvements to the dbt Cloud IDE

A follow-up: More improvements to the dbt Cloud IDE

Nate Nunta

Mar 20, 2023

Product News

It’s been four months since the launch of the new Cloud IDE that brought with it major performance and usability improvements.

Feedback on it has been very positive, but as a newly relaunched product, it hasn't been without issues. That's why our team has been focused on relentlessly improving it. We've recently rolled out updates to deliver:

🏃🏽‍♀️ Better performance: The new IDE is built with technologies that allow us to more easily identify and address our top performance bottlenecks. Most recently, we implemented a new file tree component that improved render time by 60%!

💪 Improved reliability: We’ve invested heavily in the reliability of the product. This includes things like minimizing the error rates from our API endpoints for a smoother experience, and increasing our test coverage to ensure that our newest features pass an even higher bar for quality.

🐛 Fewer bugs: We've addressed hundreds of bugs over the past quarter, and the cumulative effect has been a much smoother experience. I want to thank you for your patience through this process and your continued partnership in helping us to make the Cloud IDE even better.

Toward a more feature-rich future

But the improvements we've been working on go beyond performance improvements. Today, we're excited to announce the release of a series of new quality-of-life improvements to the Cloud IDE! These new features are designed to help you stay in the state of flow, and make coding easier, faster, and more convenient for developers of all levels.

Over the past month or so, you may have started to notice some of these upgrades to the IDE experience:

• You can now commit and revert individual files. This makes it easier to manage your code changes on a granular level and ensures you always have a clear work history.
• You can now see DAG node colors in the IDE DAG visualization, released as part of dbt-core 1.3.
• The DAG view now defaults 2+model+2 instead of the whole lineage. There is also a new option to adjust the DAG selection.

• You will now see more autocomplete suggestions when editing a YML file; this is powered by dbt-jsonschema.
• Take advantage of newly added right-click and double-click options, allowing you to do more inside the IDE with fewer clicks.
• You'll now see an error message when trying to make requests while in an error state.

• You can now link directly to your git repo from the IDE (available for GitHub and GitLab users on multi-tenant dbt Cloud instances).
• Enjoy new custom syntax highlighting for SQL files. For example, syntax highlighting 'stg_customers' and “stg_customers” will now show red highlights.
• You can now use advanced commands via the command palette to further speed up your workflow (Command-P or Control-P).

We’re also not done! Over the coming few months, we’re planning to ship several more features. Soon, you'll be able to:

• Edit the file diff view in the right pane. This means you won’t need need to open a separate tab to edit the file.
• Add basic checks to suggest dbt deps when required, ensuring that your dependencies are properly managed and your code is up-to-date.
• Duplicate files by right-clicking.
• See a warning when you accidentally press Command-W or Control-W.
• Preview md and csv files directly while you work.
• See additional information about your models more easily, such as description and lineage.

I’m confident that these new quality-of-life improvements will make our Cloud IDE an even better tool for developers, and I look forward to continuing to hear your feedback and suggestions as we improve the IDE experience.

For more updates about the Cloud IDE, don't miss the #dbt-cloud-ide channel in the dbt Community Slack, and follow along at https://docs.getdbt.com/tags/ide for any further releases.

Last modified on: Mar 05, 2024