on my side, I do not have so many problems with this navigator. Current bugs bother me, but these are bugs that will be fixed.
On the concept, I like the new interface. Each of the objects/modules that I use often is in its own tab. In the navigator, I display an object that I used temporarily. Once that is done, I folded the tree, and I can select another object in the navigator. And so on. For me, the navigator is not more crowded than the former. Above all, I have less tabs. it is better organized.
Maybe people who have the most difficulty with the new interface are those that use RB in parallel to old projects?
But I really RB/Xojo used for only one year, this may be why …and I do not remember very well how I used RB before Xojo!
I’m in the same boat. Sure, I’d change a few things, but changing the navigator is far from my #1, doesn’t even hit on my top 5. My largest project is ~65 classes and ~50 windows with who knows how many custom controls/container controls. I’m sure others have larger projects, but I have no real problems with this size, I think it’d have to quadruple in size.
I do wish once a tab was locked it would stay locked, but that really is the only navigational problem I have and that doesn’t seem to be such a navigational issue as a tab issue. Find in Selection, a Shortcut to the Filter TextBox, Back and Forward Keyboard Shortcuts, Focus Stealing and Windows Keyboard Text Entry mangling are my top issues. Solve those and I’d be a happy camper!
Tabs not staying locked is a major disturbance to me. Every now and then I’m leaving the current place of editing and jump to some other area of coding, mostly by issuing a search.
Now when I doublecklick an entry from the search result then I may end up with a tab titled as ‘mulitple selection’ and I have to remember the method, class, module etc where I was before and then again drill down the navigator to find it again.
You’re not having to click 2-3 times as much as you had to in RS? Because that is the only way I can see being to drill down into the classes and events that are in one huge list. And if you don’t keep things closed you are not working on way to many items are open in the navigator, meaning you have to scroll through hundreds of items. The search on top of the navigator helps, but I really get tired of searching for things.
I am glad it is working OK for you, but you are clearly in the minority here. A lot of us are struggling with the navigator.
When navigating, sometimes. But I find that I drill down, focus on a particular area, problem, bug for a period of time. Thus, I usually open 2 or 3 tabs with the items I wish to work on and rarely use the navigator. Then on top of that, a lot of times I’ll just hit Cmd+Shift+L for quick navigation jumps (which could be greatly improved with fuzzy matching). Another thing, I use a lot of folders to organize my code, thus when working on a particular subject for the day I may have open a few folders in various tabs, reducing what I am looking at and have to drill down into (a little).
Over all, I think I waste more time clicking back into a field I want to edit in the inspector, or fumbling with Find w/o it’s ability to search in a selected group of code.
BTW, judging from this thread and the feedback points this issue has generated, I’m sure I’m in the minority.
Coming from the VB world, which has some great third party IDE add ons, a debugger that works about 5 times as well, and edit-and-continue, I had always considered RS, to be subpar in terms of IDE usability (please no thread-drift, this is just personal opinion, I know many prefer RS to VB, we don’t need to rehash that). I had gotten used to RS, but still thought it could be better. But after struggling with Xojo for several months since the beta, and moving back to RS for the time being, RS suddenly seemed a lot easier to me. I guess this means that every thing is relative, but it really highlights the problems with the Navigator for me. There are clearly some improvements in Xojo over RS, but in my experience, all that is given back in the productivity hit I take dealing with the Navigator.
and BTW Jeremy, I appreciate the thought out and respectful posts you make, you seem to be one of the calmer voices on the forums, me not being one of them!
Well, whatever solution they decide on can’t just be pulled out of their back-sides. That Navigator is a complicated beast with a complicated job. I’m not sure that wholesale replacement gets any closer to useful any faster than sorting out the glitches over a couple more releases and seeing where it stands. Frankly, I like the Navigator now better than the way Real Studio works. I don’t like that it’s easy to get lost in drill-down. I think there are better solutions available than making it like Real Studio. I suspect they’re trying to figure out a nice way to say, “we know there are problems, but we think we have a better handle on this than anything that’s been suggested.”
I believe a simple solution to the problem would be keep the navigator as is but:
Make tab locking work properly
When double clicking an item, do not select it then launch a new tab, simply launch a new tab leaving the current tab alone
Thus, you can expand/collapse the main (1st) tab as you wish, then just double click things to open in a new tab. Possibly an option to auto-expand items launched in this way.
When I downloaded XOJO R1 and saw the interface plus that Windows XP, service pack 2 was still being supported I thought, oh,oh, hope XOJO has a backup plan.
XOJO R2 hasn’t changed my opinion.
[quote=23347:@Jeremy Cowgar]I believe a simple solution to the problem would be keep the navigator as is but:
Make tab locking work properly
When double clicking an item, do not select it then launch a new tab, simply launch a new tab leaving the current tab alone
Thus, you can expand/collapse the main (1st) tab as you wish, then just double click things to open in a new tab. Possibly an option to auto-expand items launched in this way.[/quote]
I’d add to your list the following:
For every action that can take you to the code editor (such as clicking the Pencil icon, right clicking a method name, clicking on a compile error in the error list, etc.) provide the option (or default) to either “Open in a new tab” or jump to the tab which holds this object, if one is already open.
I think having a toggle to view the module code all in one code editor window would be great. I know it’s a “Classic” idea but I really like being able to scroll all my methods and properties and just collapse the ones I’m not using at the moment.
I voted for it but have this same sentiment. I’m not necessarily thinking everything needs to rolled back. But they do need to rethink this thing a bit.