This is another one of those things where different people do things differently. I find the current tool really annoying once I get beyond a very few layers. I don't find the simple text indenting at all helpful once we are past a couple of layers. I don't find the cmd-D stuff very helpful in practice.

For *me* an Explorer-like rake would be much more usable wrt seeing what is happening. I do, however, see your point about the all-or-nothing issue; certainly having the 9400-ish senders of #new would be a bit of a pain. Then again, it's not so good in the current tool either, but very large lists are always hard to do UI for.

Adding a 'hide these'/cmd-d capability to the treemorph might be an interesting way to get the best of both worlds. It would provide a sort of cmd-z too, just click on the 'hidden things' to re-open them.

I would point out that I'm *not* suggesting making a UI that 'opens up' a method and shows all the implementors of all the messages in that selected method. I would still want to use the same cmd-n/m stuff; I just want it visually presented in a way that works for my perception. 

> On 2022-02-28, at 5:43 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'd like to make a UI suggestion that would ameliorate quite a few cases of this need - use a PluggableTreeMorph (as we do in the Explorer-inspector) to show the tree of messages.
> 
> I remember now.  In Pharo's, there was no need to select "implementors" at all, you simply keep expanding the tree of sent messages.  I don't think it could backtrace at all, though.
>  
> It would allow a bit more control over what you see at any point, without removing messages  with the cmd-D etc as now.
> 
> It'd be less control, not more, because you can't trim individual levels with Cmd+d.  You'll always have either all 67 #at:'s (expanded) including the ones totally unrelated to what you want, OR none of them (collapsed).  Try out Pharo's, you'll probably hate it.  So you can't get rid of Cmd+d, and nor would it be good to combine it with expand / collapse capability, because those functions would be confusingly ambiguous to the goal of tracing code.
> 
>  - Chris
> 


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Runs squares around the competition.