I really love how Borland's Allen Bauer, Danny Thorpe and others elicit feedback on their development efforts through their blogs. It creates good will with their customers so they have a vague idea what is coming, and they get to provide feedback and influence the process.
Allen has a post about he and Steve Trefethen's efforts to improve the gutter in D2005. They even included some screen shots.
My first suggestion was going to be to put the blue dots directly over the line number dots, then I thought, why not just make the line numbers blue instead of putting a blue dot on them? The next logical progression would be to make the line numbers red for a breakpoint. Maybe bold too. The break point is already fairly obvious because the whole line is colored. I would keep the execution point as a green arrow and use the bookmark icons. Maybe alternatively colorize the background instead of colorizing the text. I would like to see some variations on that. By colorizing the white space or the line number itself then there is more information displayed in a smaller space. Also, if you are going to only display line numbers on every 10th line, I would ALWAYS display the line number on a folded line, maybe on the line after it too or instead. That way you would know what line it was even though it was folded. While we are in the gutter, something that would be really nice is the ability to close a folding block from within the block. Either by clicking the line in the gutter just like you would the plus (preferred) or clicking on the end of the block. The right click fold menu is a huge help! I wonder if Visual Studio will finally have that whenever their next version comes out.
2 comments:
Hey, one problem with your "just make the line numbers blue" suggestion: It wouldn't work for people who are colour-blind.
I realized that after I posted it. My bad.
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