cfr VS fernflower

By the way, I recommend using https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/ as a decompiler of classfiles when possible, it's significantly more readable than the javap output.

Next I'd try to use only the fat jar as dependency and pray that nothing breaks. If it does and is not trivial, you might have to decompile (cfr is excellent), fix, recompile and patch the jar.

I'd also like to thank the MinecraftForge Team for creating ForgeFlower, the fork that QuiltFlower was based on, and Lee Benfield for creating CFR and it's truly incredible test suite.

Hello! Today I'm happy to announce the release of a project that me and my friends have been working on over the course of the last year, Quiltflower! Originally intended just for use with the QuiltMC toolchain with Minecraft, Quiltflower quickly expanded to be a general purpose java decompiler aiming to create code that is as accurate and clean as possible. If the name sounds familiar it's because Quiltflower is a fork of Fernflower, the (in)famous decompiler that was developed by Stiver, maintained by Jetbrains, and became the default decompiler in Intellij IDEA. Fernflower also quickly found its way into many other tools. After many frustrations with it myself with its decompiled code structuring and quality I decided to do something about it, and here we are! Over the past year, Quiltflower has added support for features such as modern string concatenation, a code formatter, sealed classes, pattern matching, switch expressions, and try-with-resources, and more. Quiltflower also focuses on the code quality of the decompiled output, and takes readability very seriously. We'd greatly appreciate it if you'd give it a try, with our Intellij Plugin or as a standalone jar. While it has come a long way it's still a work in progress, and feedback can be reported on our issue tracker.

You can decompile the classes into .java sourcecode using Fernflower and store that to disk, then use the Attach Sources option to add it to the binary dependency you're using. This allows you to edit the source freely for your reference while continuing to use the original binary.