Ergonomics - Rant

Simon Kirk simon at pinesoft.co.uk
Tue Jul 17 23:24:44 UTC 2007


Damien Cassou <damien.cassou <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 
> 2007/7/17, Ramon Leon <ramon.leon <at> allresnet.com>:
> > Ditto, I love the auto parens. I much prefer to highlight and wrap
> > expressions than manually opening, jumping to the end and closing. 
> > It's one of my favorite editor features.
> 
> I feel less alone suddenly.
> 

Damien, you're certainly not alone as far as I'm concerned.

I love Squeak, absolutely love it. But, I still think that it could learn
from other IDEs. 

In particular, the autocompletion features in Eclipse for things like 
brackets, strings, comments and semicolons for Java are fantastic. I think
that eCompletion (if that's what does the bracket/string/comment/etc
completion) has a few flaws that make its usability a bit frustrating.

For example, auto-wrapping a string is fine, but if I then typing a string
character inside a comment (so, for instance, writing a string that
contains the substring "I'm") it will automatically add another apostrophe,
as if I were writing a string in-code.

There are a number of foibles like that that ought to be relatively simple
to fix for eCompletion, and would improve the experience considerably (in 
my opinion anyway).

I know for a fact that I am much faster at writing code using a highlight-
and-wrap approach to adding brackets, say, and I think people miss the
point that one can use keys (ctrl-and arrow to move/select by word
boundary, ctrl-and-home/end to select from the caret to the start/end of
the line, etc) to control the selection highlighting, rather than having to
move to the mouse, where they may find they slow down.

I've also experimented before (in Eclipse, as Squeak's undo/redo behaviour
is still pretty unpredictable) by undoing all my changes over a large undo
history, then redoing them (holding down the redo key) and watching the way
my code "grows" as I write it (it's quite fun to watch ;).

Therefore I can comment that in my opinion I code in much the same way that
Todd described earlier in this thread - and that I find that autocompletion
and judicious keyboard skills actually aids and smooths this process,
rather than hampers it.

I also know I get incredibly frustrated when I use a co-worker's image
where the autocompletion isn't there :) I also know that I don't visibly
see my co-workers code any faster or more elegantly when I watch them code
on their non-autocompleting images in front of me (even though
autocompletion annoys them in much the way others have described here), at
least not because of the lack of autocompletion.

Finally, the other autocompletion of using ctrl-space with eCompletion I
find far superior to the older alt-Q method. Apart from anything else using
alt-Q always seems to give me the wrong option (because Roeltyper helps
eCompletion know which option I really mean, I suppose).

However, to follow up what Gary Chambers said elsewhere, we've found that
eCompletion can leave Controller instances hanging around that seem to tie
up memory and not get garbage collected. Not entirely sure why.

My £1 worth (I ended up writing so much it wasn't just pennies :)

S





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