The Code Bubbles IDE

[Paul Wheeler]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 2:15 PM, Andreas Pakulat <apaku at gmx.de> wrote:
> On 11.03.10 08:30:31, Manoj Rajagopalan wrote:
>> Hi kdevelop-devel,
>>
>>    The video demo is cool and I thought I'd share it with you all. This IDE
>> looks a lot like a cut of the KDE baskets app but for code and I wonder if
>> this is achievable, maybe as KDevelop 5?
>>
>>     http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm
>
> Looks cool. I don't quite see myself benefiting from it for normal coding,
> there's too much mouse-interactions there and while writing up code for a
> new feature or a longer bugfix I really only need a single editor (as I
> can't multi-task anyway).
>

I really like the look of it. As another user said, you need a big
screen. I was unable to look at the movie on a large screen so was
difficult to tell the usability. I can imagine a case where stepping
through code esp when debugging this could be very usefull.

For coding I could see a workflow along the lines of:

- Hack away at a function.
- Need to change or look at another function call so press shortcut
key to follow function.
- Next function opens up to the right (preferably a tabbed set of
functions if there is virtual/template versions).
- Finish hacking/looking so press the back shortcut key to return to
the previous bubble.
- Need to look at the calling function so press the up shortcut key to
move back up to the calling function.
- etc...

This would mean not needing the mouse but if a larger view is
available then you could view lots of code without needing to keep
jumping windows all the time. I would guess most people work like this
at the moment given how good kdevelop is at code navigation. This just
presents a different way to view a working set. I would guess that it
is fairly straight forward to implement in the kdevelop code as all
the major parts are there (working sets, code navigation, editor) the
only thing that is needed is a nice view widget.

I just hope I can get some time to do some work on kdevelop at some
point soon :-(

Paul

> But the idea of seeing small portions of code (functions) next to each
> other while stepping through code and debugging is really nice. That might
> be really useful...
>
> Andreas
>
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>
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