Light Table

Speaking of cool Kickstarter projects, here’s one that can use your help to reach funded status — Chris Granger’s Light Table IDE:

Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we need a real work surface to code on, not just an editor and a project explorer. We need to be able to move things around, keep clutter down, and bring information to the foreground in the places we need it most.

Watch the video to get the gist of the concept. Granger aptly compares it to a drafting table:

Towards the end of my time on the Visual Studio team, I came to the conclusion that windows aren’t a good abstraction for what we do. Other engineers have large tables where they can scatter drawings, tools, and other information around. A drafting table is a much better abstraction for us. We shouldn’t need to limit ourselves to a world where the smallest moveable unit is a file — our code has much more complex interactions that we can better see when we can organize things conceptually.

★ Monday, 23 April 2012