omh@cs.brown.edu (Owen M. Hartnett) (08/31/90)
Here's a couple of suggestions which I think would add a lot of utility to the editors in the above mentioned languages: 1) This should be real easy: There's plenty of room on the horizontal scroll bar line. Squish it to the right (a la MPW -- please not to mention that name!) and make a space for the name of the procedure or function whose text is the top line of the editor. Thus is the top line of the screen is code from the procedure foobar, it will display foobar in the status box. 2) Harder: As the previous request shows, it is probably obvious that many of my procedures/functions are larger than a screen full - some are three and four screen fulls (no flames please - I know that the idyllic Pascal programmer only writes short curt little procedures which are then called from other short curt little procedures - but it ain't my style.) Thus, it would be great to have a "collapse" command - whereby all the text between the begin on the current line and it's companion end can be collapsed like an outliner. You could display a single line (maybe a tilde ~?) and perhaps a diamond shape (where the stop signs are now) to indicate the collaspe. Naturally, clicking on the diamond or the tilde would restore the text to its original full glory. Of course, the text would really be there, but once you've debugged a section of code, you could collapse it so that you could get the whole procedure displayed in one screenful. -Owen Oh, one more thing. I mentioned this to David Neal at the last BCS techgroup meeting he attended, but I don't know if he remembers: If there could be an option to allow the windows to remember their scrolled position from the last time they appeared. Windows always open to the start of the unit, but usually I was down in the dirt working on some crud on the bottom when it all crashed. Owen Hartnett omh@cs.brown.edu.CSNET Brown University Computer Science omh@cs.brown.edu uunet!brunix!omh "Don't wait up for me tonight because I won't be home for a month."
hpoppe@ncar.ucar.edu (Herb Poppe) (08/31/90)
In article <48689@brunix.UUCP> omh@cs.brown.edu (Owen M. Hartnett) writes: > Here's a couple of suggestions which I think would add a lot of utility > to the editors in the above mentioned languages: > > 1) ... > > 2) ... Thus, it would be great to have a "collapse" command - whereby all the text between > the begin on the current line and it's companion end can be collapsed like > an outliner. I second this and would like to encourage THINK to add more "language sensitive editor" features to their compiler environments. For example, it would be useful to have a "palette" of syntactically correct language forms (case statement, record definition, etc.). Click on one, it gets inserted at the current cursor location. A nice feature for those of us that constantly move from language to language during the work day (if its 10:00, this must be "C"). In another vein, I hope THINK will branch out and develop other programmer's tools. How about an "interface builder" for the TCL? Then I'd like to see them give Aranda a run for the money. Herb Poppe hpoppe@ncar.ucar.edu NCAR (303) 497-1296 1850 Table Mesa Dr. Boulder, CO 80307-3000
niko@du248-16.cc.iastate.edu (Schuessler Nikolaus E) (09/01/90)
Niko Schuessler niko@iastate.edu