It feels like an alien world moving into the Smalltalk live environments and the patterns I've built up over the years and tools like Vim, etc are indispensable when it comes to moving around and modifying code. Of all the reading I've done on it, the entirety of the language is contained inside images. I know that the Pharo guys have engineered this marvel, and I think it's on the verge of a breakthrough with a lot of people if they can ease into it somehow.

It is an alien world.... but a better one by most measures.

I come from Emacs (20+ years when I first encountered the Smalltalk IDE), and find aspects of code editing irritating sometimes, but the overall value of the IDE more than pays for that irritation.

One of the coolest things is TDD carried to an extreme level. I build my test, and it fails because there's no such method, so I get a debug window and tell it to create the method... then I fill in the contents and click proceed... and picks up where it left off! It either works, or I'm back in a debug window fixing what failed. Total time from thinking of a test to working code, often less than 5-10 minutes.

Here is an example of Pharo style TDD.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o

> by most measures

Please do show some measures.

Small pedatic correction, Xerox PARC guys have engineered this marvel for Lisp, Smalltalk and Mesa (later Mesa/Cedar).

This work was the genesis of IDEs.

>It feels like an alien world moving into the Smalltalk live environments

Yes -- it's advanced alien technology. Vim, pfffft!

(Joking of course, but there's no reason a Smalltalk environment could have a Vim-behave-alike editor, but even better, e.g. with semantic knowledge of the code instead of just words and chars).

That does sound amazing.