Antwort: [Idle-dev] IDLE plans

[Albert Brandl]

Hi!

>We discussed IDLE's current tendency to create lots of top-level
>windows, versus a more "pane-oriented" approach.  We couldn't reach a
>conclusion, except that pane-oriented should probably be an option.
>We decided to put off coding the pane-oriented version.

Panes are most helpful when there are different views at the same
thing. An example: Homesite, a very powerful HTML editor has two
panes for each file: One with the HTML text editor, the other with a
view of the result (actually, an embedded Internet Explorer).

If IDLE has different views of the same information that need not
be accessed at the same time, grouping them by panes thus might be
a good idea. Assume that it is necessary to provide an overview of
a source file which only contains the class and method names
together with their doc-strings. This overview could be placed on
one pane, and the code on the other pane.

This approach would IMHO make no sense for the class browser. Here,
it's essential that both the source editor and the browser are
accessible at the same time. Still, they are strongly coupled -
I think you should consider to replace the two top-level windows
with one, bigger window. This would create a much stronger visual
connection of the two elements and thus prevent the user from
searching around the screen for that darn class browser ;-)

     Regards,

          Albert