Pybricks Editor - Auto Download and/or Github Integration

[Kikketer]

I'm starting out the FLL season and want to challenge some of the more experienced participants to either write python code or at least use the more advanced features of the block editor (like importing custom modules to help split the code better).

However there are two things that are holding me up from making this real, it's mostly slight annoyances that a patient adult would be able to handle but not impatient middle-schoolers:

• Spike Prime editor running on a chromebook is able to automatically save the file as it's edited down to a google drive. Basically when a user actually saves the file (and happens to put it in a google drive location, but locally may work as well) the editor will automatically sync changes back to that hard drive location as they edit.
  • This really REALLY helps kids not lose their work and helps me manage the 11 laptops I have, each student is able to grab basically any laptop and load their code because they all share the same google drive.
  • Google drive also manages history of files, so it's almost a git style versioning (although a bit more annoying due to no actual commits)

So as a feature request, I'd suggest either something like what the Spike Prime editor does with auto-sync down OR even better would be a true github integration. I'd love to see the ability for users to clone a repo, edit code and commit back to the repo. For example Makecode Arcade is able to do this type of thing and it was actually a fantastic learning experience for students to see how version control works.

Obviously this is a big ask, things like conflict resolution, etc etc are all annoying things to manage. But I'm sure there are simple short-cuts that could be made like auto pull/fetch to make sure they are always using the latest copy of code and auto-branching if conflicts arrise.

The real goal is to allow students to use the awesome block coding and simplicity of connecting/testing their robot via the current Pybricks application but also leverage the ability to share code with their teammates. Users of this age will never remember to manually download code when they are done and add it to a repo managed locally, nor will they remember to upload latest copies of code from a locally managed repo.

[MrGibbage]

We have been using pybricks for three seasons. We use VS Code and github. I have a tutorial here: https://github.com/MrGibbage/fll-pybricks-vscode-tutorial