This message was previously posted on the eap-list -- perhaps this list is 
more appropriate. 

I'm a new convert to the revolutionary IDEA.  This IDE has already changed 
the way I think about code and programming tasks, and I haven't yet 
familiarized myself with all of the refactoring and live template support. 
As a server-side programmer, I love where the effort has been spent in 
developing the feature set.  I'm now recommending to my company (however, 
I'm not the first in my company to realize its potential) and to all 
colleagues that we switch to IDEA. 

I've been downloading the Ariadna EAP releases, and eagerly await the 
arrival of the new release.  I've come up with a few suggestions and 
comments.  I hope these are useful, either for incorporation in the upcoming 
release, or as directions for future development: 

Implement "Find in Project View"
 - move mouse over class name, or any variable declared as class,
 or any method/member of class, choose from context window, and the
 file declaring the class is selected in the project view on the left
 - Why?  The project view and/or source view are the primary top-level
 navigation tools for the developer.  It's easy to navigate between
 classes by control-clicking, or "go to declaration", and this option
 provides a facility to realize where they've navigated to by their
 primary navigational guide. 

CVS: support "Show History" and the ability to generate diffs between 
versions
 - The show history functionality for local VCS is very useful to see
 what's been done between versions.  It would be very nice to have
 this same feature for CVS versions.  Updating to older versions with
 sticky tags can be left to command line, but version history and
 graphical diffs are tedious to generate. 

Debugger: better multithreaded support
 - in addition to "create watch", support "create fixed watch" to watch
 an object in memory, regardless of the current stack frame or context
 - this is very valuable to help determine what objects are being
   manipulated by other threads
 - provide some ability to stop at a breakpoint only in a certain thread
 (maybe this could be done with conditional breakpoints, but I've had
 problems with intermittent hanging and crashing) 

Augment "Show Type Hierarchy"
 - instead of showing the hierarchy for the current file open in the
 editor, show the hierarchy of the variable's/class/method under the
 cursor instead
 - just a time saver -- doesn't require navigating to the class in an
 editor window first 

Bugs:
 - lock tab sometimes doesn't appear in tab context menu
 - fix: it usually reappears after a hide/unhide tabbed window
 - when quitting, i'm prompted to exit existing command/process.  If I
 click cancel, the IDE quits anyway.  I would expect the Quit operation
 to be backed out without terminating the process I have running 

Wishlist Items:
 - Open extension framework for 3rd party extensions! (I'm sure you've
 heard that one before)
 - support multiple compiler output directories that can be mapped to
 different sourcepath directories
 - allow sourcepath directories to be configured to be included in
 "find usages", "refactor", "compile", etc.
 - for example, I'm writing an extension to a framework.  i want to
   understand usages, hierarchy, etc. of the framework, but I don't
   want to include it in compile, and I don't want to apply
   refactorings to it. 


Please CC me on all replies, as I don't regularly read the eap-list. Thanks! 

 -- Erik 

-- 
Erik Pearson                                       Caribou Lake Software
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                         http://www.cariboulake.com/
612.837.9802 (office)
612.868.1392 (cell) 


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