Hi - I’m slightly ahead of you on that journey - but what I do is press shift-enter which gives you a great tool called spotter that lets you explore more interactively. In spotter if you also press cmd-p it will also preview method source too - so it’s close to what you are asking (and many methods have docs on their first line). However - selecting a method in spitter will also show you other senders of that method - some of those being test cases, which really give you insight into how to do most things. In fact this is a powerful element of Pharo that is often overlooked - as it’s written in itself, and all the source is there, there are excellent examples of how to do real things - even how the compiler and browsers work.
I mention the latter, as it occurs to me that in the code completion list, it would be nice to press shift-enter on the method you are contemplating and be able to spot on it (or maybe even the whole autocompletion list) - I think this would actually be quite doable (armed with a bit of system knowledge of course). This was something I missed when I first came across Smalltalk - I was frustrated it didn’t do X (that my pascal environment did at the time ), not realising that it was simply 3 lines of code I could easily add to the environment myself (and nowhere near as complicated or painful as writing plugins for eclipse or IntelliJ). While at it - another nice trick, is to ctrl -shift click on any item in the environment and you get a little graphical halo appear - of which one icon is debug, which then let’s you inspect the code of that item (perhaps a button - which inevitably has an owner or a callback method you can then jump to and see the source of, and thus figure out how it works). It’s all very magical and dare I say fun... and this is why we love Smalltalk and Pharo , they are so malleable. Tim Sent by iPhone Sent from my iPhone > On 25 May 2018, at 02:12, andreo <andrzej.ols...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Dear Pharoers, > > I'm just starting out with Pharo 6.1, and I'm trying to use code completion > to interactively explore various objects and their messages. However, I'm > having difficulties doing this efficiently - I think I must be missing > something obvious, and I hope you can point me in the right direction. > > For instance, let's say I have the below in Playground: > > 'some text' asMorph > > and I would like to display the morph object as a window, but I don't know > the exact message name, or whether such a message exists at all. If I type > "Window", then the completion popup will show a long list of matching > messages, but won't show their documentation or argument names, so it will > be difficult to know exactly what these messages do. > I can see that one can do "Do it and go" on an expression and then browse > the available messages in Meta, but maybe there is simpler/faster way? > > How would an experienced Pharo user typically go about discovering the right > messages in such situations? > > Best regards, > Andrzej > > > > -- > Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Pharo-Smalltalk-Users-f1310670.html >
