nWire review
Many years ago I was a Smalltalk programmer using IBM's VisualAge for Smalltalk. For the day it was the state-of-the-art IDE. Eclipse eventually grew out of that effort. And now, what I consider to be one of the best aspects of VisualAge is once again available to me through nWire Navigator.
In Smalltalk it was called TrailBlazer. I loved it. But I didn't think it really caught on at the time. It took a while to get used to and that was more than the average developer was willing to put in to it. But they didn't realize the long term benefit.
Now we have nWire. woohoo!
Most developers around here have two monitors for their development. I have one and use VirtuaWin instead to get multiple desktops. And I have Eclipse maximized in one of the virtual desktops.
Here is how I use nWire.
I have an Eclipse perspective with an editor on the top half of the window, full width. And on the bottom half I have a tabbed window (full width) with nWire as the leftmost tab. I have various other tabs in the notebook but don't really use them since nWire does just about everything I need. On the editor I have "breadcrumbs" enabled. This takes the place of the package explorer and the outline view. That's it! I develop all day long without deviating much from this basic set up.
I also configure a few things to make it flow naturally, at least naturally for me.
Set the nWire filter to "ALL".
Link the editor to the nWire Navigator. That is the icon with the down arrow.
Unlink the nWire Navigator to the editor. That is the icon with the up arrow.
Toggle on the Smart Focus Mode.
With this configuration the nWire Navigator stays in-synch with your cursor in the editor. And if you want to navigate around in nWire you just have to double click on an entry and it loads the editor for that item. Easy, natural.
Btw: you load the breadcrumbs feature by adding the currently open file to the breadcrumb with alt-shift-B.
I use MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench Version: 8.5.
Our company has implemented Dress Up Your Wedding and FireMail using this set up. Only lately have I started using nWire. I wish I knew about it sooner.