audit-ui-thread-safety

Prevent UI freezes and ensure a responsive user experience by validating threading rules and migrating blocking calls off the Event Dispatch Thread (EDT).

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").