Hi Norbert,
Indeed, this was one of the main new additions to Moose. Lukas helped with the refactoring support and I rebuilt the browser to show that you can have a Glamour browser without and explicit UI model. It seems that it works :).
I am happy you like it. The point about variables is a good one. Could you please add it to the Moose issue tracker?
https://code.google.com/p/moose-technology/issues/detail?id=920
But, I think it can still be improved further. The goal is to have the developer only use this browser during development, without needing the Pharo system browser. We are almost there, but not quite.
In general, I am interested in any experience of using the browser and in learning when it falls short and makes you have to use the system browser.
One thing that is utterly missing is the support for testing. PetitParser comes with a beautiful support for tests and I would like to bring these tests close to the productions.
Those sound like good ideas. In my case it was a debugging issue. I needed to go back to my grammar and look why certain snippets cannot be parsed. So avoiding the system browser isn't the right goal here. What helped is the separation of example text and matching pane. Switching to the debugger was very helpful because the grammar is utterly complex and I don't know what something is meant to be most of the time. In the debugger you can follow the parsing and figure out easily what has been matched.
That is even the way I developed my test cases. I don't have a repository for productions and test data. So I took live data followed the debugger and his matches. From that I verified things by hand and then I did a test case for it.
I was missing an inspector that gives me an inspector of the parsed model but I found it while writing the first mail :)