emilprogviz

I've always felt the same, so I recently made an interactive mock-up of such an IDE feature: https://emilprogviz.com/expand-calls/?inline,substitution Not mobile friendly, best seen on desktop. To inline a function call, either click the "+" icon, or go up/down with the keyboard and press spacebar when the caret is on that line.

(There's also a video where I explain the reasoning behind the mock-up, but I guess the motivation is already blatantly obvious to most readers of the above discussion, so feel free to skip the first chapters: https://youtu.be/wdf6S6oumH8 )

Then I learned that the Smalltalk editor Pharo has a similar feature! Seems many people have the same idea. Today's major IDE makers should have copied this feature already!

Wow, thanks, I'm really happy you liked my videos so much! I wonder how many of us have great tool ideas in private notes sitting on our hard drives, not really sharing them with others. I'm glad your ideas overlap with mine, because the more people have the same idea, the more likely it is to be a good one, I think.

> when there are two strong, conflicting views, you do a pros/cons analysis on both

Yeah, it's not easy... I've participated in endless, looping debates as much as anyone - I guess it's just human psychology. But with enough conscious effort, I find that it's sometimes possible to take a step back, take a fair look at both sides, and design a best-of-both-worlds solution. I'll apply this method again in future videos, and if I can inspire a few more people to use it, that's great. Making the programming world a tiny bit less "tribal" and a bit more constructive.

> I've sent you an e-mail a while ago

Yeah, let's continue our discussion over email. I replied to your email from my private address, let me know if it got through.

> That's a first-class contribution. I think you should post the link to your site as a HN submission

"First-class contribution" gave me tears of joy :) I'd like to "Show HN" in a few months. Once I post there, I might get a lot of comments, and I want to be available to answer the comments and make follow-up videos quickly, but currently my personal life is too busy.

> Please don't take that demo site down, or publish it somewhere persistent

Feel free to spread the URL around, I plan to keep it online for the rest of my life, or until the feature is available in popular editors - whichever comes first. And if someone wants to mirror the demo elsewhere, it should be easy to do so, since it's client-side only and MIT licensed.

> Also, welcome to HN! :)

Thanks! Been lurking here in read-only mode for years, but today I finally had something to contribute.

Signed up just to say that I've also really, really wanted such a tool since forever. While for example the Jetbrains IntelliJ family of editors has the automatic "inline function" refactoring, they do it by permanently modifying the source code, which is not quite what we want. Like you say, it should be transient!

So I recently made a quick&dirty interactive mock-up of how such an editor feature could look. The mockup is just a web page with javascript and html canvas, so it's easy to try here: https://emilprogviz.com/expand-calls/?inline,substitution (Not mobile friendly, best seen on desktop)

There are 2 different ways to show the inlining. You can choose between them if you click the cogwheel icon.

Then I learned that the Smalltalk editor Pharo already has a similar feature, demonstrated at https://youtu.be/baxtyeFVn3w?t=1803 I wish other editors would steal this idea. Microsoft, are you listening?

My mock-up also shows an idea to improve code folding. When folding / collapsing a large block of code, the editor could show a quick summary of the block. The summary could be similar to a function signature, with arguments and return values.