Comment by armchairhacker 5 days ago
I think development environments are an undervalued field (perhaps because people hate writing UI). Tiny open-source IDEs are a great learning tool and can be starters for research IDEs (whereas VSCode, while more practical for production IDEs, has complexity that gets in the way of experimentation).
Another tiny open-source IDE (for Java) is https://github.com/bobbylight/RText
IntelliJ lets you detach separate windows for almost all of the minor panes.
Click on the 3 dots on the top bar, View Mode, Window. It works for example for the file tree, Runners pane, Terminals etc. And it's easy to "dock" them again (an icon shows up in the window to do that) so you can try it easily.
I always keep some stuff like diffs, for example, in separate windows, it just makes me less confused about what's "temporary buffers" (as you would say in emacs) VS "actual files".
Also check out BlueJ https://www.bluej.org/. It's a simple IDE targeted for students learning Java.
BlueJ is Zen-simple but surprisingly usable for real work. If I could have only one IDE and had to choose between minimal and bloated, I'd pick minimal every time.
That's a blast from the past - We used BlueJ in high school ~20 years ago!
I've wanted to create an IDE which uses a multi-window design. I think most IDEs are just doing a left-drawer bottom-drawer layout where the left drawer has all your files in a tree and the bottom drawer has your terminal. I've somewhat recently taken to detaching the solution explorer from the main window in Visual Studio and I'm kind of enjoying it. It's like what used to be GIMP's original default interface, with a main editing canvas and a few floating toolboxes