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