Re: [Usability]Looking for UI ideas for a gnome IDE

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

Hi Duncan, I'll read your message more closely in a minute... But as a
first suggestion, you should consider integrating with an existing IDE.
The stronger we can build the core tools, the better off everyone is
(including you :-). It would also save you a lot of time re-developing
things that already exist in that IDE. I would suggest looking into
extending either Anjuta (http://anjuta.sf.net) or Eclipse
(http://www.eclipse.org). 

I don't really know much about Anjuta, but Eclipse is built around a
plugin infrastructure that makes an enormous amount of extension
possible, but also allows you to leverage common framework built for
things like debugging, syntax highlighting, searching, building ... even
a TODO list! The Java dev tools that currently come with Eclipse are
primarily intended to demonstrate the platform-at-work and are written
entirely as plugins themselves. It should be basically possible to do
almost any language you want with Eclipse (which is what it was designed
for, since companies and others take it and make their own custom
products out of it).

cheers,

-Seth

On Fri, 2002-08-30 at 17:58, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm helping with a rewrite of hIDE the IDE for Haskell.
> 
> http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d99josve/hide/
> 
> This time it will have a nice UI, oh yes. :-)
> 
> So I'm looking for some ideas for the overall structure of the UI.
> 
> One key feature that makes it different from other IDE's I've seen is
> that it will integrate much more than just editor pages and a couple
> other windows like a project management window (it's completely
> extensable using Haskell as the embeded language). There will be
> documentation pages, Todo list, build results, search results, call
> graphs etc.
> 
> I wanted a common way for the user to handle all these pages. I was
> thinking of allowing the user to have a mix of top level windows and
> pages in a tabbed notebook. So that for example the user may arrange
> many editor or html documentation pages to be in a tabbed notebook. But
> the todo list or project management page are seperate top level windows
> so thay can see that at the same time as the other windows.
> 
> Anjuta1 has this kind of scheme (albeit it's mostly for editor pages),
> as well as allowing docked windows (which I've never found work well
> from a UI perspective).
> 
> Now my problem is where do I put the menu toolbar items that are
> specific to a particular page? 
> 
> I could put them inside the notebook pages, but this seems a bit odd -
> I've never seen this done before. 
> 
> I could try to put them all in the top window's toolbar and disable /
> hide them when they are innapropriate. This does't feel nice either, as
> there may be lots and hiding is generally bad UI design. It also doesn't
> work well with multiple top level windows as the stuff enabled / visible
> would depend on the currently selected window - which is horrible and
> highly dependant on the way the WM works.
> 
> This wouldn't be so bad if there were only one notebook, ie if there was
> only one top level window like in most editors eg gedit, rather in the
> Delphi / Kylix style. Kylix uses a separate top level menu / toolbar
> window: http://www.drbob42.com/gif/Kylixongnome2full.jpg
> 
> So what to do? All suggestions welcome.
> 
> BTW if I've not explained myself very well I can post some glade files
> or screenshots.
> 
> Duncan
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