Re: [Caml-list] Future of labels

["Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu>]

Hi Jacques,

> I hoped that people would enjoy ocamlbrowser like you
> and me.
> Surprisingly, they do not seem to use it that much... habits, lack of
> advertisement ?

I've tried OCamlBrowser on a few occasions, but its default behavior
is not quite intuitive enough for me to make it easier than looking
things up in the ocaml manual.  Here are a few reasons...

* I was never able to make the search functions work (which is precisely
what would have made it REALLY useful).  

* Since it uses pop-up windows, I find that my screen quickly fills up
with dozens of windows so that pretty soon I can't find anything or see
what I'm doing.  I wonder whether it would be worth considering managing
those windows yourself (i.e., enclosing them all in some big window that
you manage) and using some kind of tiling scheme to manage the space
better (with history/focus mechanisms to help recover recently viewed
stuff).

* Adding a path to the search path does not seem to have any persistent
effect, so every time I restart I have to manually fix up the paths to
find the lablgtk libraries, for example.  (I know there must be
command-line switches to do this, but I have never become a serious
enough user to look for them.  What I'm describing here is my experiences
as a naive, occasional user.)  

Even better would be to be able to switch easily *between* sets of paths
(something like Unison's named profiles), so that I could keep the
standard OCaml libraries in one pane, the lablgtk interfaces in another,
and the Unison sources in another.  When they're mixed together, the main
interface list gets too long and it's difficult to find things.

* One feature that I'd REALLY like would be the ability to click on a use
of an identifier and be transported to its def-site.  Similarly, I'd like
to be able to click on a declaration in a .mli file and be taken to the
corresponding definition in the .ml file.  I guess doing this right 100%
of the time might be hard (at least, it might require help from the
compiler), but I'll bet a simple guess would usually be OK.

        Benjamin


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