Improving productivity

Hi Andy and Blair,

When writing code a the class name or method name or even self has to
be typed in or by a copy and paste it to another workspace. It takes a
few highlites and clicks to do this and slows down productivity. Since
an IDE's purpose is to help the programmer be more productive I
propose the following functionality in the CHB.

When a method or class name is highlighted in the CHB panes, to have
the ability to drag the name into a workspace and place the cursor on
the first parameter.

Another way would be, when a method or class name is highlighted in
the CHB panes, to have the ability to press CTRL-W or right-click and
copy the highlighted name to a special internal location. Then when
you are in any workspace you can press CTRL-W and will paste the class
name or method into the workspace.

The method name should be copied with each parameter replaced with a ?
as in the example below and the cursor placed on the first ? or at the
end of the method if there are no parameters.

Example after pressing CTRL-W

at: ? put: ?

I believe this would improve markedly productivity and also help
minimize the fact that Smalltalk cannot really have autocompletion.
In addition a hotkey for 'self' would be nice.

I was actually hoping to see something like this in D5 given the fact
that other languages IDE's have autocompletion abilities.

Regards,

Costas

Costas <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
...
> I believe this would improve markedly productivity and also help
> minimize the fact that Smalltalk cannot really have autocompletion.
> In addition a hotkey for 'self' would be nice.
...

I also concur with your sentiments, I dislike excessive typing and having to
remember method and variable names.

Not to tease the group too much, but I have been working on a context
sensitive look up tool for Dolphin over the past few months.  It will
accomplish much of what you suggest, and perhaps a bit more.  You can read a
preliminary description of it here:
http://www.mitchellscientific.com/smalltalk/CJDLookUp.htm

I have it working in Dolphin 4.0, but I will need to port it to Dolphin 5.0,
and I want to use the new IDE extension example.  I would like to make it
even smarter using some experimental concepts, but if I get something rough
I might release it sooner.

Chris