There was a browser that worked on Squeak 3, Whisker, that had some of these attributes. I used it up until it became unsupported. It took a little getting used to as its primary orientation was horizontal, but in the age of widescreen monitors that is an advantage.
Yes, Whisker is exactly what came to mind for me as well.
I don't currently use Smalltalk, most of my code is now written (and read) in vscode. The means available for showing the context around the code under consideration (splitting and resizing panes, hunting through lists of tabs, scrolling around) feel pretty crude by comparison.
when i was in uni in 2014 i learned that smalltalk became obsolete, later i went to industry to see that no one use smalltalk(or prolog) and yet on this site ppl bringing up smalltalk every single month, why is that i wonder
Also it'd be nice to have something that is more spatial. A famous memory technique is remembering where things are in space[1], but I've never seen a code browser that works spatially. (I have no idea how to actually do this.)
The paper printouts on the table are a kind of simple spatial browser. Thanks to this, we have UNIX (at least it explains how they were able to create anything at all with just a teletype back then).
There was a browser that worked on Squeak 3, Whisker, that had some of these attributes. I used it up until it became unsupported. It took a little getting used to as its primary orientation was horizontal, but in the age of widescreen monitors that is an advantage.
Wiki description: https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1993
Archive of its homepage. Has an image of the browser in use. https://web.archive.org/web/20070228113449/http://www.mindsp...
Yes, Whisker is exactly what came to mind for me as well.
I don't currently use Smalltalk, most of my code is now written (and read) in vscode. The means available for showing the context around the code under consideration (splitting and resizing panes, hunting through lists of tabs, scrolling around) feel pretty crude by comparison.
when i was in uni in 2014 i learned that smalltalk became obsolete, later i went to industry to see that no one use smalltalk(or prolog) and yet on this site ppl bringing up smalltalk every single month, why is that i wonder
From a conceptual point of view, browsing code is like browsing a fractal. Tools must take this into account.
Also it'd be nice to have something that is more spatial. A famous memory technique is remembering where things are in space[1], but I've never seen a code browser that works spatially. (I have no idea how to actually do this.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
The paper printouts on the table are a kind of simple spatial browser. Thanks to this, we have UNIX (at least it explains how they were able to create anything at all with just a teletype back then).