"An IDE which makes it easy to focus on your work while hiding the  
complexity of the things you are not interested in."

Most IDEs seem to think that people only work on a single class (or  
hierarchy) at a time. But this is not the case, of course. Sometimes  
it is true, but more often than not you are working on a couple of  
classes that collaborate. In that you would ideally like to see only  
these classes, and then only the parts of these classes that have to  
do with the behaviour you are working on. What makes this hard is  
that this is something which changes rapidly over time. One minute  
you are working on extending a double dispatch scheme, the minute  
later you are changing the implementation of a related class to  
implement a singleton pattern, etc.

A number of cool browsers that I know of that try to support these  
ideas (sorry for all of those that  I am forgetting, it is just as an  
illustration):
- whisker : since you can easily work on those methods that interest  
you and edit these and only these. So you have less overhead in  
dealing with the methods you are not interested in at the moment.  
Disadvantage is that setting up a good working context is sometimes  
expensive
- the Traits browser: collapses information but allows you to expand  
it to have a more detailed view.
- The classification browser/StarBrowser/Intensive environments: the  
goal is to make it easy to set up and really use working contexts  
(e.g. all classes participating in a visitor design pattern) to break  
the tyranny of predefined relations used in most browsers (e.g. you  
can view classes according to their package or by inheritance or  
sorted by name, and that is it).

Note that from my experiments analyzing the behaviour of students  
wiorking with VisualWorks (through an extended version of my  
SmallBrother tool that would track what window was being used and  
being spawned from what other window in order to perform a certain  
action), there seem to be two kinds of users: one that like to have  
multiple windows open and those that like an Eclipse-like approach  
with only one window full-screen and buffers/tabs/views. Might be  
obvious, but it really seems to be the case.


On 19 Feb 2007, at 19 February/15:16, Damien Pollet wrote:

> 2007/2/18, David Röthlisberger <squeak at c3com.ch>:
>> more efficiently in your daily work? Where is the current IDE in your
>> way, where is it not good enough, what could be better? What do you
>> miss, what do you need to get a better IDE?
>
> Hi David,
>
> I have a problem with the multitude of different browsers. I don't
> know what the best solution is...
> a good window navigation tool like exposé?
> transient browsers that you don't need to explicitly close?
> one central window with most tools at hand and contextual inspectors?
>
> -- 
> Damien Pollet
> type less, do more [ | ] http://typo.cdlm.fasmz.org
>