Repository navigation
Provide a way to see inherited values in the Inspector #3084
Description
I'm often faced with one of the following questions:
- Why does this text look like this? (E.g. why is it gray even though I don't tell it to be gray anywhere?)
- Why doesn't this text react to changes in
TextTheme? - Where is this text style attribute coming from, exactly?
Text style comes from an inherited widget called DefaultTextStyle. In complex apps, there are several layers of DefaultTextStyle, and Text merges them all into the final style.
In the IntelliJ Flutter inspector (before DevTools integration), it was possible to show the RenderObject/Element tree, and from there, the developer was able to see the debugLabel. It was not perfect, but — as far as I know — it was the only way to debug issues like the ones listed above.
DevTools doesn't have a RenderObject/Element tree (#636), and afaik there is no other way to get to this information.
For what it's worth, I don't think the "go to the Element tree" method was the best developer experience. If we can surface this information better, that would be amazing. Like, in the widget tree above, I can imagine showing information about the Text's current TextStyle's debugLabel somewhere in that tree.
Activity
kenzieschmoll commentedon Aug 21, 2024
The
debugLabelshould be accessible from the widget's render object, which can be evaluated and dumped to console in the Inspector. However, I will keep this FR open to track creating a better UX to understand inherited values.[-]Provide a way to see TextStyle debugLabels[/-][+]Provide a way to see inherited values in the Inspector[/+]