There was a browser that worked on Squeak 3, Whisker, that had some of these attributes. I used it up until it became unsupported. It took a little getting used to as its primary orientation was horizontal, but in the age of widescreen monitors that is an advantage.
Yes, Whisker is exactly what came to mind for me as well.
I don't currently use Smalltalk, most of my code is now written (and read) in vscode. The means available for showing the context around the code under consideration (splitting and resizing panes, hunting through lists of tabs, scrolling around) feel pretty crude by comparison.
I set out to create a better text repl experience for Common Lisp couple of months ago, but was inspired by the pharo interface and built something much larger: https://atgreen.github.io/icl/
I use it all the time.
I fondly remember the browser in F-script Anywhere was fantastic for debugging your own apps and reverse engineering other people's.
Smalltalk is how computing should have been: an open book. I hope that one day we can rediscover that magic, we surely have the computing power available to do so.
Longtime HN user morphle, who commented elsewhere in this thread, has researched and designed chips and hardware for that purpose (edit: for scaling that form of computing). He has been trying to find funds and partners to bring them to market.
Disclaimer: never met or spoken or worked with him
Morphle here. Thanks for mentioning our work [1]. We still seek funders and students we can teach.
We build on the shoulders of the generation that built Smalltalk but just retired. There is a huge amount of documentation, science papers and talks on how to implement it all.
We are starting to implement the final step: An autonomous European secure operating system running a hierarchy of Virtual Machines (message passing parallel bytecode Smalltalk, Lisp, Erlang) and Qemu VMs with a modern GUI in less than 30.000 lines of source code that can be fully understood by a single person.
We improved our hardware to a manicore European Morphle Engine processor architecture that can run microcode, bytecodes, X86, Arm, Risc-V and other Qemu supported processors faster than the native chips.
We have some funding from Ukrainian drone innovators that need cheap computer chips manufactured in Europe, not controlled by the US or China.
We hope the European Autonomy movement away from US Big Tech clouds, operating systems, surveillance and chips with political kill switches and backdoors built in will fund our operating system and app software.
Imo, the problem with the 4-pane browsers are:
1 - The left-most 'package' pane is a flat list. And there are 10K + classes in e.g. Pharo. There are 900+ (!) packages in Pharo, in the pane, so its not easy to scroll through. This is solved 'manually' by have a hierarchical naming of packages. I think this pane should just have tree view.
2 - When developing an app, you may be working on classes in multiple packages. You want to have 'project' view with a simple way of switching between them, without having 10+ system browser windows open, like shown in the article. Dolphin Smalltalk has implemented this concept.
Shameless plug: SmallJS (https://small-js.org) has these too..
Whenever I tried dabbling in Smalltalk, I would feel constrained by the system in terms of raw real estate. I never cared to view the system through the narrow slit of the method code editor. I would suffer the explosion of windows. All of it was off putting to me, and I never pushed through it to work with a project long enough in order for it to be comfortable.
But, let's contrast it to Java, which pretty much is in the same boat as a modern Smalltalk. A very large core system of packages, classes, and methods. Wrapped in a spider web of dependencies. And, granted, I've been working with Java a long time, and this is all quite comfortable to me. But at the same time, it doesn't suffer the issues that the Smalltalk browser presents.
Consider, regarding the parent point, the entirety of the JDK is not typically presented in the modern IDE. It's just back there. There's no real estate committed to it. There's your project (typically), with its classes.
I use NetBeans, so I have a project view of packages and classes, I have code tabs of individual classes, and a contextual method navigator within a class.
Its routine to potentially have a tab explosion, in contrast to a window explosion when exploring code. But when I do that, all I get is the code window, not the entire project or context of the class.
That is, in my code, I can click on, say, an ArrayList method, and jump to the JDK source code for the method within the ArrayList. I don't get its entire package hierarchy, I get its method list (uncatagorized, but alphabetical) while viewing the code file. So, the impact of viewing a new method is minimal -- it's just a new tab.
But as a benefit, I get to see not only the method I'm interested in, but I get to see the context of the code around the method. When I code, I don't write methods in a vacuum. I organize my code somewhat around aspect of the logic of the class. So, if there's a method that does one thing, chances are that the methods around it are doing similar or related things, or part of the logic of whats going on. Proximity in the source file tells part of the story not captured at the method level.
Sure, I can click around, in the navigator, in the IDE directly to visit other methods, but I can also scroll about, have the breadth of the class as a canvas and gather the ebb and flow of the logic within it. This is stark contrast to the ST "tiny" method browser.
I can also search globally within the source methods rather than just method signatures, while still having access to call trees and references and many of the other wonders of the ST browser.
Totally agree the only viewing methods in isolation,
is less valuable than viewing the methods around it "for free".
Indeed the methods in my classes are caryfully ordered,
to keep ones that are used together on the source together.
(And SmallJS is file based)
> But, let's contrast it to Java, which pretty much is in the same boat as a modern Smalltalk. A very large core system of packages, classes, and methods.
Java is used in many places. Smalltalk is not. The whole comparison falls short due to this already. TIOBE ranks Java #4 right now, which is not too bad, even though TIOBE also sucks.
Rather than a fixed 4-pane browser, a potential solution is to use something like the macOS finder's "Column" view, where each layer of the hierarchy produces a new pane, as many as you need to drill down to the particular thing you're looking for.
Extending that, an outliner can be a great way to deal with this stuff. The problem becomes the self-referential nature of OO systems. Outliners are good when you get to the method of interest, but then you have the problem of browsing senders and implementers.
Still, there's nothing worse than a Smalltalk without a class category list. Smalltalk/MT, for example, just had a class hierarchy browser, and the category class member variable was left blank. I found it very hard to know where to start looking for behavior.
While I agree that the package column has room for improvement, some of the 'largesse' can be handled by the search field at the bottom of it, and once you get to doing something serious you could set up your own image and ditch a lot or most of the standard distribution.
I think I'd prefer a pane view over a tree view because the higher levels retain their scroll position even as I browse beneath. Is there a similar UX possible for tree views?
cuis smalltalk has multiple "browsers". One browser allows you to restrict your view of the system (the leftmost pane) to a specific package (eg: the one you're actively creating right now).
While the article makes good points, I simply find it amazing that a programming user interface (with small changes) has been around for so long: I think kit was in 1983 that Xerox Special Information Systems provided me with a free 1 month Smalltalk license for my Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine. That Smalltalk interface is amazingly similar to Pharo Smalltalk which I still occasionally use.
I worked as a Smalltalk developer for a few years, and it spoiled to such an extent that I’ve tried to make an extension for IntelliJ to replicate the browser for Java development. Maybe I should revive that project, actually…
Also it'd be nice to have something that is more spatial. A famous memory technique is remembering where things are in space[1], but I've never seen a code browser that works spatially. (I have no idea how to actually do this.)
Self's environment was a panning desktop where you would inspect an object's slots and as you kept opening things, they would exist in some space nearby. You could, in theory, keep these things open and have a much more spatial feeling about the system.
I don't remember there being any way to collapse and re-expand this context so that it could persist yet be out of the way when you didn't want to look at it.
The paper printouts on the table are a kind of simple spatial browser. Thanks to this, we have UNIX (at least it explains how they were able to create anything at all with just a teletype back then).
Don't remember that, but I do remember the one for Gupta SQLWindows. I had a discussion about with its designer on reddit some years back, and he admitted it was a horrible mistake. Programs are text, folding is not a great way to represent text.
Do Smalltalk IDEs really not have the concept of different "views" of the code? The 4-pane hiearchical view is clearly valuable, but why would it need to be "surpassed" rather than complemented by other views that are available when needed and can be switched to or even shown alongside the traditional view?
If that kind of thing doesn't exist (and the article sure sounds like that), then yes, it appears the smalltalk ecosystem really has fallen decades behind the state of the art in the IDE area.
Historically, Smalltalk has many browsers (views). This System Browser is one of many browsers, and the most busy-looking.
You can browse within it, and also spawn off other kinds of browsers from it.
And these browsers are extensible with others. As someone new to Smalltalk, I was pretty easily able to add a visual class hierarchy browser into this environment:
Half the things we know or think about in HCI, the people at PARC figured out before we were born, and sometimes before the hardware to test it existed.
They have many views, the trouble is the proliferation of these views as you go through the code. You browse to a class and method, then you want to see the senders, and so you open that, and then see the implementors of a method a sender calls, and so on.
Then it sounds less like a specific problem with the 4-pane browser, or SMalltalk IDEs, or Smalltalk, and instead simply an overcomplicated way to state the obvious: large codebases are complex and difficult to navigate. No shit.
Readit News
Wiki description: https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1993
Archive of its homepage. Has an image of the browser in use. https://web.archive.org/web/20070228113449/http://www.mindsp...
I don't currently use Smalltalk, most of my code is now written (and read) in vscode. The means available for showing the context around the code under consideration (splitting and resizing panes, hunting through lists of tabs, scrolling around) feel pretty crude by comparison.
Just saw your post to the Common Lisp reddit.
Consider also posting to the larger Lisp reddit.
Smalltalk is how computing should have been: an open book. I hope that one day we can rediscover that magic, we surely have the computing power available to do so.
https://www.chromium.org/developers/f-script-anywhere/
Disclaimer: never met or spoken or worked with him
We build on the shoulders of the generation that built Smalltalk but just retired. There is a huge amount of documentation, science papers and talks on how to implement it all.
We are starting to implement the final step: An autonomous European secure operating system running a hierarchy of Virtual Machines (message passing parallel bytecode Smalltalk, Lisp, Erlang) and Qemu VMs with a modern GUI in less than 30.000 lines of source code that can be fully understood by a single person.
We improved our hardware to a manicore European Morphle Engine processor architecture that can run microcode, bytecodes, X86, Arm, Risc-V and other Qemu supported processors faster than the native chips.
We have some funding from Ukrainian drone innovators that need cheap computer chips manufactured in Europe, not controlled by the US or China.
We hope the European Autonomy movement away from US Big Tech clouds, operating systems, surveillance and chips with political kill switches and backdoors built in will fund our operating system and app software.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbqKClBwFwI&t=2s
But, let's contrast it to Java, which pretty much is in the same boat as a modern Smalltalk. A very large core system of packages, classes, and methods. Wrapped in a spider web of dependencies. And, granted, I've been working with Java a long time, and this is all quite comfortable to me. But at the same time, it doesn't suffer the issues that the Smalltalk browser presents.
Consider, regarding the parent point, the entirety of the JDK is not typically presented in the modern IDE. It's just back there. There's no real estate committed to it. There's your project (typically), with its classes.
I use NetBeans, so I have a project view of packages and classes, I have code tabs of individual classes, and a contextual method navigator within a class.
Its routine to potentially have a tab explosion, in contrast to a window explosion when exploring code. But when I do that, all I get is the code window, not the entire project or context of the class.
That is, in my code, I can click on, say, an ArrayList method, and jump to the JDK source code for the method within the ArrayList. I don't get its entire package hierarchy, I get its method list (uncatagorized, but alphabetical) while viewing the code file. So, the impact of viewing a new method is minimal -- it's just a new tab.
But as a benefit, I get to see not only the method I'm interested in, but I get to see the context of the code around the method. When I code, I don't write methods in a vacuum. I organize my code somewhat around aspect of the logic of the class. So, if there's a method that does one thing, chances are that the methods around it are doing similar or related things, or part of the logic of whats going on. Proximity in the source file tells part of the story not captured at the method level.
Sure, I can click around, in the navigator, in the IDE directly to visit other methods, but I can also scroll about, have the breadth of the class as a canvas and gather the ebb and flow of the logic within it. This is stark contrast to the ST "tiny" method browser.
I can also search globally within the source methods rather than just method signatures, while still having access to call trees and references and many of the other wonders of the ST browser.
put one browser on your code and the other on your tests
Java is used in many places. Smalltalk is not. The whole comparison falls short due to this already. TIOBE ranks Java #4 right now, which is not too bad, even though TIOBE also sucks.
Still, there's nothing worse than a Smalltalk without a class category list. Smalltalk/MT, for example, just had a class hierarchy browser, and the category class member variable was left blank. I found it very hard to know where to start looking for behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
I don't remember there being any way to collapse and re-expand this context so that it could persist yet be out of the way when you didn't want to look at it.
If that kind of thing doesn't exist (and the article sure sounds like that), then yes, it appears the smalltalk ecosystem really has fallen decades behind the state of the art in the IDE area.
You can browse within it, and also spawn off other kinds of browsers from it.
And these browsers are extensible with others. As someone new to Smalltalk, I was pretty easily able to add a visual class hierarchy browser into this environment:
https://www.neilvandyke.org/smalltalk-chg/
Half the things we know or think about in HCI, the people at PARC figured out before we were born, and sometimes before the hardware to test it existed.
https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
Interlisp-D, now recovered and playable in the browser,
https://interlisp.org/
Mesa with XDE (think the safety Zig is selling today, but in 1985)
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf//xerox/xde/...
Cedar, a full graphics workstation in the evolution of Mesa, now with proper mix of reference counting + cycle collector, as full GC implementation,
Here the demo done by Eric Bier for the Computer History Museum,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
https://blog.lorenzano.eu/content/images/2026/01/Pasted-imag...
Abstractions have to be earned.
Abstractions have to be exposed so they can be either questioned or exuding their properly valued and time tested structural ontology.
In 2015 I wrote how a cool Smalltalk IDE in a web browser would be:
https://blog.sebastiansastre.co/posts/the-smalltalk-ide-i-wi...