Why is the Arduino IDE so stupid?

If I perform the following actions:

• File, New Opens a new editor window. Reasonable enough, although I would have preferred a default single-window GUI model like QtCreator or even gedit.

• File, Save Opens a save as dialog. In spite of the Arduino ‘sketchbook’ directory, it opens in my home directory.

• New Folder Creates a directory New Folder, but doesn’t shift the focus to it, leaving you confused when this is done in a directory with a lot of files…

• Click on ‘New Folder’ and rename it, say, Test123

• Navigate into Test123/

• Type in a filename for the project, say, TestTest1

• Hit save. So now Arduino IDE dutifully ignores what I typed and proceeds to create a tab called ‘Test123’. It will even do this if ‘Test123/’ already existed. What?

• File, Save As. It forgets where you where in the hierarchy and starts in the home directory again(!)

• Navigate to Test123/ intending to use it as a container for multiple projects

• Type in a filename, say Hello, then hit Save

• The sketch is still called Test123. What?

So insanely enough, it seems you essentially create a director and thats where the sketch gets its name.  Within that directory it creates a file with the same name with the extension ‘.ino’

Lets try something else:

• From the shell, create a directory, Test456 and create a readme.txt file, and a directory Test456a and a file Test456a/readme2.txt

• File New

• File save

• Navigate into Test456

• Type in helloworld for the name

• Again, the project gets called Test456

• But take a look in the directory Test456: the contents are now gone (all, including the sub directory Test456a) and replaced with Test123.ino Wait, what? THIS SHOULD NEVER EVER HAPPEN!!!!

Luckily I discovered this in a directory in a git working copy with no modifications so I didn’t lose anything important.

Testing done using Arduino1.5.8 amd64 for Digispark. So its a little out of date but not exactly the oldest either.

I have used Arduino before and to be honest I don’t recall it being this stupid, but maybe I just got lucky.

One difference is this time I got sick of the massive latency opening the windows and tried a few different Java JRE (openjdk6, openjdk7, gcc4.7-jre) before discovering that with gcc4.7-jre the menus are as snappy as the openbox right click menu, or even a (sharp intake of breath) brand new Windows 7 corporate desktop… maybe there is some API implementation difference between the JRE’s that affects the file save dialog functionality.

I don’t seem to have any issues opening projects.

So my workflow for creating a new project now consists of:

• From the shell, create a directory in the relevant part of the git working copy I am using

• Create a new empty .ino text file with the same name as the directory (or copy a template I made)

• Open it with the IDE and start working