You can open GMS, you just shouldn’t open the specific resources in GMS if you’ll be opening them in GMEdit.

I don’t know what “doesn’t even compare variable names means”, but GMEdit has a lot of type checking and JSDoc lines that can warn you about mistyped variables.

In some situations it is feasible to work with “labels” instead of values in variables, eg: The state of a menu with many submenus is more “readable” with something like menuState=“graphicOptions” than menuState=7.

That’s a job for enums, but also people sometimes just have a few variables in the object, like

GRAPHIC_OPTIONS = 7;
// ...
menuState = GRAPHIC_OPTIONS;