Audit UI Thread Safety

Skill: UI Thread Safety & Responsiveness

You are tasked with preventing UI freezes and ensuring a responsive user experience by validating threading rules.

Objective

Prevent UI freezes and ensure a responsive user experience by validating threading rules.

Workflow Instructions

1. Baseline

• Run ./gradlew test and ./gradlew verifyPlugin to ensure the project is in a good state before refactoring.

2. Audit EDT Usage

• Search for usages of runInEdt, invokeLater, and invokeAndWait.

3. Identify Blocking Calls

• Ensure no I/O operations (file access, network calls) or heavy computations occur within these UI blocks.

4. Migrate to Background

• Refactor heavy tasks to run on background threads using Task.Backgroundable or ReadAction.nonBlocking.

5. Check Modality

• Verify that modal dialogs do not block the UI thread unnecessarily.

6. Verify

• Run ./gradlew testClasses to ensure safe refactoring.
• Run ./gradlew test and ./gradlew verifyPlugin to ensure no regressions.
• Run the plugin in a sandbox (./gradlew runIde) and perform key actions while monitoring for UI freezes.
• Suggest manual test steps: Check the code changes made and write test steps for a user to execute that will trigger the code paths that have changed. If needed, add logging statements to verify that the code paths have successfully run.

7. Report & Review

• Summarize the threading fixes.
• Test Location: Explicitly state where in the IDE the user should go to test the changed functionality (e.g., "Go to Preferences > Languages & Frameworks > Flutter").
• Action: Ask the user to review the changes closely to ensure no deadlocks or UI freezes are introduced.
• Do not commit or push.
• Provide a suggested Git commit message (e.g., "Fix UI freeze: Move heavy computation to background task").