Room for GPUI programmatic tests?

[seantiz]

Hi all,

I spoke on the Zed Discord a few weeks back with a regular contributor to GPUI, who let me know that UI-based tests are pretty much eye tests right now. Which is fair enough!

I'm wondering if there's any upcoming window where there's more confidence around shipping programmatic tests in gpui package?

I did start writing a some naive one to reproduce a known bug, and i'm just asking because I'm having fun writing Rust and exploring GPUI. I'd like to make a contribution here when the time is right.

[SomeoneToIgnore]

As a preliminary idea, an accessibility framework would be an amazing base to deal with this.
Another branch of thought might involve #31443 and some improvements on top.
Lastly, there's no way to start a full Zed instance in tests right now — this feels like the most beneficial first step into this direction, as even being headless, would allow us to properly test various focus change things (which are not very well testable now).

Either way, there's no particular timeframe defined for these improvements, but visual tests are sure nice to have for certain areas of Zed.

[seantiz]

As a preliminary idea, an accessibility framework would be an amazing base to deal with this.

I feel an accessibility framework is definitely the most manageable thing for me solo.

As I understand this, the framework would be a wrapper around TestAppContext and readable + reusable methods for Entity, View and Element testing. Then it's a case of "are these methods intuitive, do they make me want to use them?" as a way to guage if we're getting somewhere.