Heh. I think it's funny that the trend in modern IDEs is for your code to get squished into a smaller and smaller box in the middle, surrounded by a ton of random crap. It's the exact opposite to the environment I strive for.

(also, "Solution Explorer"? That was the best name they could come up with?)

To be fair, he seems to have enough space for code. horizontally at least. Monitors today have plenty of space for random crap. But the bottleneck isn't real estate anymore, it's focus.

What we need is for the other windows to gradually fade out when focus is in this one for a while. One of the video plugins/sites on tv-links had this feature - as you watched a show for a while the rest of the screen would gradually fade out.

Or we could go with two vertical panes: http://akkartik.name/desktop.html :)

Compiz has an option to do exactly that. It's called ADD Helper. Unfortunately, XGL doesn't perform very well on my laptop.

your font makes me want to stab my eyes out... otherwise, nice. :)

Response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74768

Yes, it's called "Solution Explorer" because when you use Team Foundation Server you open up solutions. So "Solution Explorer" is very appropriate.

Are you speaking English? It looks that way, but I can't parse "you open up solutions". Solutions of/to what? And how does one "open" a solution? I'm also not sure what a "Team Foundation Server" is. I know all of the words separately, but put them together, and they no longer have any meaning for me. I think I missed a trend or a meme or a memo or a brochure or something.

I'm not intending to be a smartass, I really just have no idea what you just said, and looking at the screenshot doesn't really clarify. "Solution Explorer" looks like a file browser, to me.

In Visual Studio parlance, a 'solution' is a set of projects that logically belong together. For example, in a web site, your actual web app may be one project. A back-end scheduling task may be another, etc..

All of these together form a 'solution'. So, in that sense, the term 'Solution Explorer' kinda makes sense if you squint right. Whether or not the word 'solution' is appropriate at all is a different issue entirely...

Ah, OK. So, a "solution" is made up of many projects, which is made up of many files? It sounds very enterprise-y. I'll promise to stay out its way, as long as it stays out of mine.

And I guess I can get by without knowledge of what a Team Foundation Server is or does.

I don't know, in my 1900x1200 window I have quite a lot of room for things besides the code on the side, like a REPL window, etc.

yuck.

stuff like code folding and automagical code generation encourage all the wrong habits. Simple, readable, and reused code is "tight".

An upvote alone cannot express how much I agree. I spend a lot more time reading code (even my own) than I do writing it. Code generation and concise languages reduce the effort of writing code by similar amounts, but concise languages reduce the effort of reading code by an order of magnitude or two.

I don't know if that's true. What reduces the effort of reading code is using the right abstractions in the code. Concise languages can make some code incredibly hard to understand. I'm switching between Python and Lisp these days but I have never had problems reading things like Java because of the verbose syntax. I do however have problems reading Perl or badly written code in any language.

concise != short.

You can have short code by using single-letter variable names and avoiding whitespace. It doesn't gain you anything. But concise code says exactly what it needs to say and no more, and that can be much more readable than lots of boilerplate.

Up to a point, avoiding whitespace does gain you something. It means you can fit more code on the screen at one time. In languages with C-like syntax, I've taken to putting consecutive close-braces on the same line, at the indentation level matching the outermost brace. It's surprising how much it helps.

I disagree. The amount gained to having more on the screen is much less than what is lost to readability. Whitespace is your friend.

I do exactly the opposite, where each bracket gets its own line, never going on the same line as code. This helps create an excellent visual division of blocks on the page.

I completely disagree. Objective-C is an incredibly readable language precisely because it is verbose. Message parameters have labels, what a concept!

Bad Vista.

Here's mine. Also Visual Studio.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=1810430961&size=...

Page is private.