I’ve been using smalltalk for a while now and I love the language and the concept. What I just hate is the System browser. This tool doesn’t even resemble a modern IDE. How am I supposed to code without tabs, outlines and handy shortcuts? I often find myself implementing a selector and noticing that it would be nice to isolate a piece of code in a separate (private) selector, just for readability shake, but I don’t. Because it takes like 5 mouse clicks and I have to navigate away from the selector I am working at, and navigate back to it. Oh wait, I can’t! Because it has syntax errors, because I haven’t finished it yet! Kills me. And I don’t have a 24 inch display to open 3 browsers.
Sorry for a little rant. My question is, is there a real IDE (Eclipse, Net.Beans, VS) for smalltalk? Maybe for some commercial version of smalltalk?
Historically, the real “IDE” is the Smalltalk one, and one could claim that the others are just an adaptation to the limits of traditional textual programming languages (not rethorical, just check out the evolution of typical development environment UIs and how they are adding features that exists in Smalltalk from the very beggining, like the senders and references in VS).
Just a side note: actually more than 2000 open-source projects in the SqueakSource repository were coded without tabs, outlines and shortcuts (I think still in Squeak you can cross reference any text selecting and pressing with Alt-6). I can’t tell you how sad I feel when I must to go back to file based developement, still don’t understand why most developers love to sweep text, mess with line numbers and page up-down files in directories. The good news for you, is that you have many options:
There is an alternative browser called BobsBrowser (works in Pharo 1.3) which lets you browse
The advantage over the Whisker browser is that the hierarchical lists are attached to a window while in BobsBrowser you can detach them.
It all depends of the different activities you’re performing when you’re developing. With some experience in Smalltalk you’ll find that you prefer some browser for exploratory insights and others for refactorings, etc. BobsBrowser for example is good for knowledge organization or custom navigation of Smalltalk classes and categories, the hierarchies you can see are the organizations from the Smalltalk reflective meta-architecture at any level (classes, senders, implementors), and they are expandable/collapsable (in the classic system browsers you can only expand the system categories and subcategories).
The instance variables were shown historically in the Smalltalk/V flavors, and there is an old goodie (from Squeak 2.7 IIRC) to enable it back again but almost nobody today maintains the classic System Browser in Squeak/Pharo. Adding that feature to OmniBrowser would be more complicated though because is a browser framework (as every serious framework, it took some time to learn it for the first time), although the effort of the Squeak/Pharo community is absolutely incredible, still the Smalltalk community needs more developers.
You have also a commercial Smalltalk which isn’t public (downloadable) yet but includes IDE-like features of traditional programming environments