Browser feature suggestion

Lyndon Tremblay humasect at shaw.ca
Tue Dec 21 05:35:59 UTC 2004


The Whisker Browser is an amazing innovation. I realise now a sudden
surprise as to why this was not considered for the proposed "development
package" incorporation. Adding/incorporating what OmniBrowser is, as well as
refactoring tools, and perhaps variable-column support (aka the scrollable
columns, see NeXSTEP and OmniBrowser's file system browser). Multi purpose
Whisker... multitasking in a window, very powerful effects on productivity,
concept/design visualisation, and general operations (versioning, change
sets).

The name almost begs inclusion...

-lyndon

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Way" <dway at mailcan.com>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Monday, December 20, 2004 8:34 PM
Subject: Re: Browser feature suggestion


>
> On Dec 10, 2004, at 1:35 AM, Blake wrote:
> > On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 23:46:22 -0500, Yanni Chiu <yanni at rogers.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> "Very neary the same effect" - not really. Usually I've got about
> >> three or four windows that cover these title bars (or at least the
> >> useful info on the right). Then if you decide to keep some of them
> >> open, and close others, you end up with "holes" in the "list",
> >> which then get filled with newly collapsed windows. Without
> >> manually moving the title bars, you pretty soon lose track
> >> of the history trail you want to quickly close.
> >
> > Yep.
> >
> > Kudos to those who are comfortable with it. I'm not. The key element
> > of a modern IDE is the ability to switch quickly between windows and
> > sub-windows. Squeak is kind of awkward for me as far as that goes.
>
> I'd encourage folks interested in these issues to try out my Whisker
> Browser.  (Just open up a SqueakMap loader and install Whisker Browser,
> the latest version works with Squeak 3.6-3.9.)
>
> It's not a one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, but it does try to
> address the multiple window problem when browsing lots of code.  One
> nicety that I added relatively recently is collapsing panes in place by
> double-clicking on the titlebar, which you can see in the screenshot on
> the
> webpage: http://www.mindspring.com/~dway/smalltalk/whisker.html
>
> After using Whisker on and off myself for quite a while, sometimes the
> squeezing and resizing of the panes feels a bit too "squishy".  And I
> really need a way to have a small title "tab" or similar for each method
> pane without requiring all the space of a full titlebar... that's
> probably next on my to-do list.
>
> I'm also looking forward to the OmniBrowser framework, which I'm hoping
> would actually let me reuse some standard browser components, such as
> pop-up menus for selected methods/classes/etc.  Nothing in the old
> Browser class is really reusable.
>
> - Doug
>
>




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