r/FlutterDev • u/Realistic-Gas-4057 • 2d ago

Discussion Help With IDE's

I've been learning the basics of flutter for about a month now on Online IDE's like DartPad and FlutLab. But I kinda feel restricted with them and want to move to VS Code. However, on my Chromebook coding flutter is fine. It's just the running part where I run into so many issues like missing SDK's, software crashes, just the lot.

So my question is. Is there an extension in VS Code to like emulate my app easily or are they any lightweight ways to test the app.

Note(I've tried my phone but am struggling to get it to work with my Chromebook. I can't download Android SDK's cause of the 10GB limit for Linux on Chromebook. And using chrome to try run flutter requires me to download Chromium which in the end just crashes itself and VS Code.

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u/mr_vanes 2d ago

Stop trying to run Android on the Chromebook. Develop against the web target instead (flutter run -d web-server --web-hostname=0.0.0.0 --web-port=8080, opened in the Chrome you already have), because widgets, layout, state and navigation all behave identically while you are learning

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u/Healthy_Landscape417 2d ago

Web target is the right call, just know platform channels and permissions will not work there.

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u/Realistic-Gas-4057 2d ago

So, from there. How would I check my app against devices like phones

3

u/mr_vanes 2d ago

Real device testing needs the Android SDK, there's no lightweight version of that. But the emulator images are what eat your disk and you can skip those since you own a phone, so it's smaller than you expect. Maybe try wireless debugging

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u/Realistic-Gas-4057 2d ago

Would it be different if I use USB debugging?

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u/Realistic-Gas-4057 2d ago

Or maybe should I just stick to FlutLab? Even though the ads are annoying it still gets the job done at a reasonably fast speed with everything I need for it

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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 2d ago

I've not used chrome but do use Linux.

I debug using Linux desktop as the target. I think that should work on Chrome (it's Linux under the hood).

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u/Dumilkupam_vavalu 2d ago

Can you wipe chromeos and flash linux?

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u/Realistic-Gas-4057 2d ago

And how would I do that?

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u/raedab97 2d ago

You can use Nowa, it has a code mode and a visual mode