Guille, all,
When in doubt, look at Dolphin. It has the best IDE I have ever used. That's all the more true of 5.x.
In Pharo, the way one gets to implementors and senders could be better. I am both amazed by the system's ability to find a method name in selected text, and disappointed by that fact that I have to select text vs. just getting a list of methods from which
to choose. Choose senders or implementors in Dolphin (context menu in the method lists), and it provides a list (the selected method in bold at the top), and the locally sent/referenced methods below that.
Dolphin also has a command that uses a text prompter to enter the selector, and it allows wildcards. Pharo's MessageNames/Finder tools do at least as much as Dolphin's version of the command. My only gripe with Pharo's version of the search is that I sometimes
get too many matches; regex will probably fix it if I would just work at it<g>. Overall, Pharo is on course to do this really well.
Regardless of how one obtains a method list, Dolphin does a (much) better job of presenting the results, mostly by providing sortable multi-column lists. Looking for #add: over the entire system can be painful, but #add: defined or used in a particular package
or class can be very manageable. Dolphin makes that easy to see by sorting on the appropriate package/class/selector column.
Bill
From: pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr [pharo-project-bounces@lists.gforge.inria.fr] on behalf of Guillermo Polito [guillermopolito@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2011 10:11 PM
To: Pharo Development
Subject: [Pharo-project] About implementors and senders
Hi!
http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=4547
That is a bug entry about the implementors and senders behavior when selecting this or that in different GUIs. So, I think the whole UI has to be rethought (in little steps), and arguing about this is healthy.
So, the places where searching implementors and senders today should be:
1) a text editor
2) a message/method list
3) an inspector ?
4) ?
1) In a text editor the behavior is obvious for me :)
2) This is the discussion in the issue. The browser asks about senders/implementors of messages sent in the selected method. The senders/implementors browser just browses again the message.
I think that searching the implementors of #something while I'm browsing the implementors of #something has no sense, hehe. But the other behavior (the one in the browser) does not convince me either...
3, 4 and etcetera) I'm not sure about anything, hehe.
Cheers,
Guille