I gotta say, I was *very* happy to see the Spotter in Pharo 4. This approach, the grand unified auto-completing fuzzy find-by-anything box, is one of the greatest programming UX advances in recent memory. There's a reason there's now a version of it in every editor or IDE I know of.
That's not to say there's no place for a Browser approach. But what's interesting to me is that I think the Spotter represents the 80% case. 80% of the time, we have a good idea of what we're looking for and we just want to get to it quickly. Browsers are more helpful for the 20% of the time when we're new to the code and we're exploring. On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 12:42 AM Joachim Tuchel <jtuc...@objektfabrik.de> wrote: > We're in agreement here. It is nog about the panes per se. It's about the > fact that once you reached an artefact to read or edit, there is no need > for the navigation to cover a lot of space on screen. Multiplied by the > number of open browsers. Until you commence your journey through your code. > > Then there is the problem of navigation being much more than just packages > and class hierarchies. There is the question of why and how did I get here? > That area is uncovered in most IDEs - not only Smalltalk. > > Another problem area is the longevity of a need to have some artefact > open. How often do we close 10, 15, 20 inspectors at once, because we don't > need them any more? When we look for the place where something started, we > travel from implementor to implementor, via some senders until we finally > get to where we can answer our question af hand. Sometimes we reach a dead > end, need to go back a step or two and try another branch. But does it > really mean we need each stop of the path as an open window? Forever? Or > are there better ways to navigate? > > I am getting so off-topic it hurts, but these questions need an answer, > and the Smalltalk community should be one that can solve them much more > easily than others because our language lets us concentrate on the problem. > > Joachim
