Hey Guys,

I wanted to share here with you a small script I've done to have a support of external editors to edit your expressions and code with live updates.

It works with a system or file watcher, that means it doesn't freeze Houdini and you don't need to close your editor to see you updates It's available by a simple right-click on a parameter => expression => External Expression Editor ( you can set a hotkey ).

It works with VEX and Python expressions but also regular HScript expressions ( but with no completion ). It works very well with Visual Studio Code as it has a nice VEX and Python plugins, but it could work with sublime text, notepad ++ etc.

( I haven't tested all the IDE out there so if you find a bug with one of them, feel free to send an email to contact@cgtoolbox.com ).

A small video about it:
https://vimeo.com/242470411 [vimeo.com]

You can download it for free here:
http://cgtoolbox.com/houdini-expression-editor/ [cgtoolbox.com]

PySide, PySide2 and PyQt are supported, it is compatible with Houdini 15 to 16.5.

Hey, great tool! Thank you for sharing this!
I'll try and start using this more often.

Just a thought, would it be possible to also support the PythonModule inside an editable asset?

Very good :-)
Thank you

Thanks guys !

Unfortunately, as far as I know there is no right click menu on the PythonModule. I could add something in the right click menu of the node itself tho, I'll think about it

Thank you again Guillaume, no worries. Keep us posted if you ever get around this. No presuure

Thanks, man!
This opens up a lot of other potential as an example - on top of being an excellent and useful setup in and of itself.

Thanks a lot, it's very useful!
But how to set up the hotkey like "Alt+E" to open when selecting the code area.
(Now it has to right click on code area and choose Expression before hotkey take effect.)
Thanks again.

It works for Vex and single-line Python, but for some reason, not for multi-line Python expressions

Every time I try to edit multi-line Python expression in VScode with this plugin, it just makes the whole expression "" (empty Python string).

Edit: I'm diving in SideFX Labs' code trying to find the bug. Will submit a pull request if I manage to fix it.

I fixed that! If you want to edit Python expressions in an external editor, try this: https://github.com/sideeffects/SideFXLabs/pull/46 [github.com]

So far the tool works for VEX (Attribute Wrangle) in Houdini 19.5.368 (Python 3) and VS Code.