What about a more modern IDE?

[lagprogramming]

Xirax recent post on the mailing list about Icons and Splashscreens made me thinking (again).

It seems like developers are paying A LOT of attention to IDE and how it looks rather than developing.
But why?

Two decades ago and people would just use text-mode IDEs. Everyone would be happy. Not much to change there (except for syntax coloring highlight in the most advanced editors).
The less options to adjust is a bless. Just not having an option to modify IDE - eliminates any attempts or thoughts about changing it. Release brain time/effort to be spend on an actual task.

I'm concerned about all the new easy-type features in any notepad editor. They make typing easier. and that indulges a developer to do more typing, rather than smarter code structuring.
Indeed, why to think api through, if an editor allows you to update multiple places / refactor easier and quicker?!

Let's ignore a recommendation to fit a procedure to a screen (20 lines from text-mode IDEs) . We've code folding. And custom region code folding.

   Regarding the "(no subject)" subject found at the mailing-list I have mixed feelings: laught and cry at the same time. I love the fact that it has a saga: "Images, icons, who designed what". I didn't read that yet because I have a feeling it will take some time. The only thing that amused me as much was a mantis bug entry where, for a common and well known at that time graphic problem(or not a problem at all), the reporter gave lots of data upon request: OS version, CPU vendor and model, gfx card vendor, model, drivers and drivers version and so on. All of these in different posts. As far as I remember, the graphic problem at that time was something like nowadays TLabel Z-order problem(probably put in GTK2, too). I encourage Xirax's purpose: "My purpose is helping Lazarus if I can so I need to know what is the rules. For this I need to know who is in charge in these cases.".
   Now, putting the amusing part of the situation aside, this subject presents many Lazarus users of this community. The same mailing list had the "Do you lessen to music?When?What?How?". It appears like Xirax has an artistic vocation and he tries to help us using that more than programming. That's not a problem. I've looked only once at the IDE sources, and I didn't payed attention to this aspect. Maybe loading the splash screen from a graphic type file(instead of a resource file) would content those that share the same point of view. Everything they would have to do is to replace a BMP, PNG whatever file type, with their own. Maybe Lazarus already works this way, maybe this approach is not good enough to content them for a while, I don't know.
   In more than 10 years of FPC/Lazarus experience, I've noticed that many people pay lots of attention to this kind of subjects, ignoring subjects that propose technical or totally different approaches to what's commonly implemented. Some major changes are needed within the community and I'm pretty sure they will come. There is no alternative, otherwise such subjects will definitely increase as percentage reducing exposure of other ones. For now, I don't think it's Xirax's fault for this situation. He is the voice of many other people. As Juha said, the discussion is a deja-vu in the community. I think that a possible cause is that Xirax like people's resources can't be used by the community at the moment, these resources are wasted on all sorts of things. How to channel such resources on particular targets, how to reduce their influence over other resources, these are things probably with no answer at the moment(within our community) or that don't belong a further analisys on this forum thread(subject).