The Apple Dylan technology release contained a really great development environment. You could build custom code browsing windows to look at your code in various ways, drag and drop functions between source files, and edit a running program. Some of the more powerful Java environments are patterned after it, but none of them have implemented all the features yet.
[Apple Dylan Screenshot #1] [Apple Dylan Screenshot #2]
Gtk+ and Gnome finally support enough widgets to recreate Apple's code browser. Implementing the other features of Apple Dylan would probably prove challenging, but they could be added to a code browser slowly over time.
Ideally, our IDE would support a CORBA interface to outside tools. This would allow programmers to use Emacs (or vi) but still get many of the benefits of an integrated environment. Of course, Gwydion Dylan would always be available from the command-line, too.
Does anyone have screenshots of advanced development environments?
