Meta(
    title: "Thoughts on workflows and graphical tools",
    summary: Some("What I want instead of an IDE"),
    published: Some(Time(
        year: 2022,
        month: 10,
        day: 9,
        hour: 22,
        minute: 53,
        second: 44,
    )),
    tags: [
        "software",
        "workflow",
    ],
)
---
I've had a sort of rough sketch of an application in my mind that continues popping up every once in a while. The idea isn't yet fully formed, but it's a very persistent idea.

Those who have been around in the Unix world for more than a few years no doubt remember when Konqueror was the default filemanager/webbrowser/documentviewer in KDE. I've often wondered why they got away from this concept. I imagine the scope of the project was probably a bit unwieldy to be sure, but I still fondly remember it. Some things that I thought were cool and useful:
* You could not only open different sorts of things in different tabs, you could also split panes.
* You could open a directory with a filemanager tab, and split the view with a terminal emulator on the bottom open to the same directory.
* That last one also worked on remote filesystems.

Another program I have a fondness for is Geany, the nice little is it an IDE or just a fancy text editor. I like that even though it's not a full blown IDE, you have a terminal attached to the window. Seems obvious that when you're writing code you want a terminal always at the ready. I get that most IDE's have this functionality and then some, but I never cared for a full IDE, and Geany was the first text editor I encountered with an attached terminal.

Anyway, I've played around with terminals that have split panes and tabs. I've played around with writing a graphical text editor. I've messed around with browsers some as well. And when you're developing software, it seems that you always want quick access to all three. Your documentation is most likely going to be viewed in a browser, you're writing your code in a text editor, and you run commands in a terminal. It's easy to find a combination of terminal emulator and text editor, and Konqueror used to allow you to have a terminal and a browser open in the same window. As far as I know, however, nobody has ever tried to combine all three...

So yeah, the idea keeps pestering me. I have my desktop set up to where I usually have a terminal open on virtual desktop 1 and a browser open on virtual desktop 2. But how about an IDE like program that can, say, build the documentation for your project and open it in a browser tab? Or maybe I want a browser view open to some docs on one side of the screen and an editor on the other side. Maybe split the side with the editor so the bottom half is a terminal.

Even better would be a somewhat open architecture that provides different views and/or editors as plugins that you can stuff into whatever tab or view you want.

I realize a lot of this can be achieved with a tiling WindowManager. But I like the idea of a single program that provides more uniform keyboard shortcuts and conventions. Gtk+ already has a terminal widget in VTE, a really self contained browser widget in WebKitGtk+, and some really powerful editing features in SourceView. It's probably going to keep on nagging me...
