When I was using Smalltalk in a daily basis I had the chance to understand quite well the things that would make productivity go high. Here are some sketches I’ve done. I didn’t do the debugger and the package manager system, and both of them have great impact on this but hopefully you can imagine how productive this could be.
All collapsed by default.
A bottom bar opens with focus on the input ready to evaluate anything or open common tools in one click or key combination.
The classic time-proven Class Hierarchy Browser has two major changes: 1. it exposes a maximised hierarchy so abstractions can be visually inferred and exploration encouraged and 2. it has a permanently exposed input to a case-insensitive search that will help the user to frictionlessly jump to classes and method names.
Everything can be clean again.
Floating windows with snippets that can spawn from the main expression input at the lower-left. Floating windows are important because they allow drag-grop operations between them. On the top of the code pane, the Class Hyerarchy Browser should have exposed a couple of buttons (no more than 4 to 6) with commands that should follow a cache strategy. They should be the absolutely most basic and frequently used commands, like remove method, find senders, find implementors, versions and perhaps not anything else (unless we have data that proves is a hot cache hit).
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