ObfusCo > The List > vaj

Visual Age Blog

SmallTalk people everywhere are holding on to Java like a life preserver. I'm using the pre release for Java 1.2, so some of these bugs might be specific just to it.

26) When you set the command line arguments for a Class, and then go back later to change them, it has appended a space for no good reason.
25) The debugger doesn't reflect when the thread has finished. The buttons just become inactive (without any visual alteration).
24) The debugger needs to just list all the local variable values. Instead, you have to click on a variable in the Variable list to see it's value. If each variable had it's value shown, with a hierarchical tree for drilling down, then you could really easily monitor them all as you are stepping through. Other IDEs, like Cafe, have done it like that for a long time, so it's not even as if this is a new idea. The debugger doesn't even bother to remember which variable's value you had active anyway, so the next time you hit that breakpiont, nothing is selected and you have to pick it again!
23) The hierarchical listings need a way to open/close all items at a given level and below.
22) The textual search/replace doesn't appear to have a Replace All ability. Also, you have to hit Next after hitting Replace, which is just a stupid waste of time.
21) The console won't let you look at text as it's being generated so easily - it keeps forcing a scroll to the bottom, so you can't just stop and look at something that's already gone by.
20) The Scrapbook just doesn't do anything. The run button is disabled. Oh, wait, silly me: you have to select the text you want to run. Not a good interface.
19) The toolbar buttons don't grey out when they aren't usable. That's really utterly insanely wrong and annoying.
18) When it exports files, it doesn't put a blank line between the methods. That's annoying as all heck. Oh, wait, it also writes them out in alphabetical order which is pretty much guaranteed to be the least likely way you'd want them. So you pretty much screw up any chances of using VAJ nicely with other IDEs.
17) Not being able to see the entire file for a class all at once is really really really frustrating.
16) Uh, how to I restart something I'm debugging?
15) How come there's no keyboard shortcut for running the bloody program?
14) It doesn't blink matching parens. This is insane. People actually pay money for this?
13) In the debugger, when you mouse-over a variable, a tool tip eventually appears to show you the variable's value. However, if the value is more than one line long, the tool tip window doesn't resize vertically to make room. So you end up having a cropped view of the data, which is nigh useless (and obviously just stupid).
12) Either the cursor is just broken under Win2K, or you cannot adjust the frame boundary between stdin and stdout in the Console. Actually, all of the split panes are broken that way. (Update: it's utterly spurious - sometimes it works, a lot of the time it doesn't. The cursor just doesn't change. I think I might have had the same problem with Visual Studio on this machine, so it's probably Win2K suck.)
11) Why hasn't anybody cottoned on to the idea of having options with help text immediately available for them? Like, you could right-click on an option and ask for help on it?
10) While you are doing development work, you are constantly faced with the stupid annoying in you face interrupting obnoxious dialog "Text has been modified - save changes?" Is there a way to force it to just always save things, and never bug me? If there is, then how about also putting that option on the dialog box itself? The dialog is annoying for lots of reasons, including:
1. If you right-clicked and then the dialog came up, you then have to answer the dialog and then right-click again! If I could have just hit some save key first, it would be faster and less stupid.
2. Some operations don't bring up the dialog right away, like exporting. That's utterly insane because the I want to export the compiled code to a jar file, and of course I want everything to be up to date, but it doesn't give me that option right away.

9) Since it's class based, rather than file based, any files which have the bug of having the same class name don't generate any errors when imported, rather, the ones that are wrong just disappear!

8) When you are "importing from a directory," there's a text field which says what directory you are importing from. Next to it is a Browse... button. Where do you think that Browse dialog defaults to when it comes up? Is it the directory that is in the text field, like it should be?

7) I want to have multiple workbenches, each with it's own database so that I can have one in which I screw around and don't have to worry about importing files and having them blow out ones I already have.

6) There's nothing I can find in the documentation that tells you how to have the debugger take standard input like a filter. Also, I haven't found out how to just pass command line arguments! (Update: turns out that rather than being allowed to specify them when you actually start the program, you have to specify them in the class's Properties dialog. Whatever.)

5) There isn't an obvious way to search through a set of code. So, if I'm looking for all places a certain message is printed out, I can't just run a search. I have look by hand. Oh, wait, there's two complete different interfaces for doing searches. One only handles the currently visible text, the other lets you pick wider "working sets" to search through. Breaking them out is a stroke of utter obfuscatory genius! Also, the interface for the "working set" search is utterly insane. It requires that you tell it if the thing you are looking for is a Type, Field, Constructor or Method. You can't just say "look, just find the bloody thing, whatever the hell it is!" So, basically, I can't get it to find things which I know exist. That is not good behaviour for a search feature: it should always start out by returning more than you want, and let you whittle it down, so that you know you aren't missing anything. Oh, wait a second: I just discovered there's yet another interface for doing the simple text search. This. Is. Insane.

4) When exporting, it only exports whatever you have selected in the Workbench. It makes some sense, but it's pretty frustrating because I find I'm always in the wrong place. I tend to fix something and then just go to the Export menu item in the File menu, so I end up exporting only that one class file, rather than the project it's in. I think a better UI would be for the export dialog to list the project / package / class hierarchy so you could then pick what you wanted. This would be good because it could just default to whatever you had chosen before.

3) It suffers from the same problem as MS Word: it scrolls way too fast when trying to select multiple lines of text.

2) Since it doesn't believe in source code files, it won't let you seek to a line number. That means you can't use debug error messages to find the line that died (any time you are using a different vm / debugger, like if you are making servlets and JSP).

1) It says that it has emacs keybindings available, but when you turn them on you discover that the most basic cursor navigation bindings are wrong.