Any plans for tooling to help iterate on layout and style?

[ethanpailes]

First of all, thank you for all the great work that has gone into this project. I've just played with it a little bit so far, but it seems very nice!

One thing that I have been wondering about is the story on rapid UI iteration. Historically, many native UI toolkits have had some sort of tool for visually laying out the UI so that you can make all the fine adjustments that you really need visual feedback on easily. In a web context, people are able to easily tweak css on the fly right in their browser. It seems like any GUI platform that has gotten popular has some way to quickly iterate on style and layout without having to wait on a compile cycle.

You've probably been thinking about this a lot longer than me, so maybe you already have a vision for just such a rapid-iteration tool already, in which case, awesome! Obviously, I understand that iced is a relatively young GUI toolkit, so there are other things that are higher priority than such a tool, but it seems like the kind of thing that is worth thinking about when it comes to architecting some of the core components.

A full UI builder is a pretty big lift, so I was thinking it might be much more approachable to expose a sort of debugger-for-layout. The idea would be that you could start you app in a special mode where it will both launch a GUI and start up a shell session on the command line that feels a lot like a command line debugger. It would have facilities for navigating the tree of Elements that the app has rendered (there would probably need to be some way to be able to click on an element in the app and get an id to feed to this tool) and commands for tweaking style and layout parameters dynamically. It could have a mode where all the commands and outputs were in JSON in so that people could write tools layered on top of it.

That's just one idea, but I wanted to get your thoughts on it. Does that sound doable with the current architecture? Do you think it is worthwhile?