need some suggestions for good IDE UI

[Duncan Coutts <duncan coutts uklinux net>]

Hi all,

I'm helping with a rewrite of hIDE a Haskell IDE.

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d99josve/hide/

This time its going to have a nice GUI. So inspired by the new gnome
interface guide and anjuta's nice interface, I set about playing with
new designs in glade.

I've run into a problem. I want to have various kinds of pages: editor,
search results, TODO/FIXME lists, documentation pages, terminals etc.

I like the anjuta way of allowing you to use tabs free floating windows
or docked pages. However each of these different pages will want to have
different menu tool bar items. 

So where do I put the menus & toolbars? There need to be some global
project related items and some specific to a particular page.

Kylix uses a separate top level menu / toolbar window:
http://www.drbob42.com/gif/Kylixongnome2full.jpg

But it doesn't need page specific items so it can put them all in the
top window. It seems odd to put menus & toolbars inside a notebook page,
which is another choice.

I guess you would need a concept of the current editor page so that a
search or a compile action applies to the right thing.

Should I just go with all top level windows and let the user & window
manager deal with it? It is nice to have tabs or some similar device to
arrange screen space when you have lots of editor & documentation pages
open.

What do you suggest? 

BTW if there is a more specific UI list that might deal with such an
issue issue I'd be happy to move the discussion there.

Duncan