Error / warning symbols in gutter

[JosephTLyons]

Opening this more for discussion rather than an official feature request...

This may be a "hot take," but one thing I (and many others, it seems) miss about Atom, when I'm working in VS Code, is having some sort of indicator in the gutter that there is a warning or error on a line (people have made packages for this, but there are always issues with them conflicting with something natively-embedded in the gutter). JetBrains' IDEs don't show error / warning gutter symbols; they show them in the buffer and give some vague locations via the minimap.

If you're ever forced to work on a codebase with long lines of code, it can be frustrating having to scan two-dimensionally for squiggly-underlined errors in the buffer (especially if some of that code is horizontally off screen); having error / warning symbols in the gutter gives the user a well-defined place to look.

I believe the workflow drastically improves when:

1. Error / warning symbols guide the user to a specific line (vertically)
2. Squiggly underlines guide user to the specific location within the line (horizontally)

What Zed currently has:

• The ability to open up warnings and errors in the buffer with f8 and the ability to jump to the next one with the same command. This is nice, but assumes you are already in the mode of looking for errors and warnings - gutter symbols would help the user find error and warnings when they don't realize they exist. Additionally, the user doesn't always need to see the actual error message to know what to do to fix an error - sometimes, you just need to be aware that you wrote some bad code, be able to navigate towards it, and be able to read the line - reducing the need to open up the diagnostics in the buffer entirely.
• Project Diagnostics - the PDs can be opened in a split pane to be always-viewable while working on another file, but it isn't something that is guaranteed to always be there, like the gutter is.
• The count of errors and warnings at the bottom left side. This is mostly just a useful metric to know that errors DO exist.

Ideas:
In a hypothetical world where Zed had gutter symbols... I don't think it would necessary for them to display anything on hover, since they could find that by launching the in-buffer diagnostics. Also, I'm not entirely sure how Zed would handle having both errors and warnings on the same line - showing both is a possibility, but might take up too much valuable screen real estate, so maybe showing the highest priority symbol only (error)?

Feel free to close if that has already been decided against, I just figured I would toss my opinion on it out there, to spark discussion, if it hasn't been ruled out yet.

[nemosupremo]

Was this implemented, and is it in Zed? I'm not sure how to enable it.

[everdrone]

Why was this closed? This is useful for spotting errors quickly