Pharo 7.0 released

I see the new framework for keyboard shortcuts was completed. There are many shortcuts to customize in preferences now. Congrats! :)

Still, the shortcuts by default are totally different than the usual. Is it possible to make for example readline (bash) emulation with the new keyboard shortcuts code? Where would you start if you wanted to do this?

> As a Pharo contributor

I played with 7.0 yesterday, I have a few questions, maybe you'll be able to help me:

- I work on a Linux with high DPI display. I increased the font size of everything to extra large and set scaling factor, which helped, but the cursor is still tiny and almost invisible. I tried reading the code in HandMorph and Cursor, however, the beCursor method which handles displaying of hardwareCursor (I assume) is a primitive. I downloaded the opensmalltalk-vm and after a short fight with it succeeded in running its image. I found primitiveBeCursor method, but it calls C-level function called something like `ioSetCursorSomething` - and I couldn't locate that function. Do you know where it is?

- when you set scaling factor and font size, it's not universally recognized. The menu at the top of screen didn't change its font size, the lists with columns (in preferences, in debugger, etc.) have fixed column-size which truncates most entries (and splitter for changing the width of a column is barely visible), some elements start overlapping (tabs in the browser obscure the row with instance/class side, flat/hier and so on), the windows seem to have hard-coded initial extents which ignore font-size and scaling. To be honest it's barely usable right now for me, to the point that, to play with it, I had to create a dummy Xvnc display and run Pharo there, then run x11vnc on the Pharo window id and finally connect to it via VNC client, scaled the whole thing up. It's a bit nightmarish an experience :) Is there any work towards making it better in progress?

- related to the above, is it possible to set the initial extent of the Pharo window (the top-most, OS-level one, I mean) on the command-line? There's a switch for starting in iconified state or fullscreen, but I didn't find one like `size` or `geometry`.

- What are class "extensions"? Are they simply traits, or is it something new? Is it documented somewhere?

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I see lots of great progress on all fronts, but Pharo remains rough around the edges. The discoverability of the details is great, but the bigger picture - an overview of all the toolkits, for example, or a succinct description of architecture - is very hard to piece together. The new package manager interface finally displays a bit of description for each (this wasn't the case for a long time), but many packages have no description. Coupled with package names being rather hermetic this makes for a frustrating experience. I'm a rather persistent kind of guy and so I stuck with Pharo despite all that, but I imagine many other devs wouldn't care to do this, unfortunately.

GUI documentation will likely never show up: the current graphic framework is outdated, subject to deprecation and no subject to improvement since Athens low level layer was left as it is. It may or may not be replaced by Bloc or something else. I don't thing anyone is willing to write documentation when there is not clear direction regarding the GUI framework.

Isn't it crazy for this not to be solved yet?! That's a long time - don't remember exactly, but I started with Pharo 1.4 IIRC, and it was bad back there already, then juz got worse.

Is there a blog post detailing a) all the kinds of GUI frameworks that are out there and how advanced their development; and b) what approaches were tried and abandoned, when, and why? I know it's much to ask, but, at this point, I feel the lack of progress in this area should become a much higher priority, and a blog post like would help in recruiting people for the effort.

Just wanted to add, there's quite a lot of documentation in the form of class and method comments, which could be (a starting point for) reference docs if dumped to (even static) HTML. The fact that I can't read about the methods of Collection class in the browser, like I can do here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/datastructures.html or here: https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/pairs.html?q=list#%28... or https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.6/Enumerable.html (or basically with any other lang) in 2019 is very wrong in my opinion :(

Even after I run the image, the browser doesn't make for the best tool to learn the overview of the system. Methods are tiny and a lot of them and you must click each one in turn to see the docstring. It's not easy to know which class is in which package or why. A lot of the classes have no docstring, but are described in some the ancestor class, and there's no way to display dosctrings of a group of classes at once - instead, you have to click through them manually. Various search tools help, but it's also not immediately obvious where they are or how to use them.

The system gets infinitely more discoverable once you install Roassal, which has tons of very useful example visualizations. But it's not installed in the default image, you need to know you need it and know enough Smalltalk and Pharo to install and run it and then how to modify the examples to make them useful for your current exploration area.

Anyway, that's how it is: painful to learn. It's great if you have someone to take you through the whole thing, but that doesn't scale, while the rate of change renders non-reference-like docs (Pharo by Example, Deep into Pharo) obsolete very quickly. Putting Pharo-devs effort into actually documenting the classes and then exposing these docs in accessible HTML is something I would really love to see one day...