Re: [desktop-devel-list] Potential GNOME IDE

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 11:51:29AM -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> I'm all for moving more features from gedit into gtksourceview, since
> that benefits all users of gtksourceview, but I'm not sure that I agree
> with your argument in favor of specialized text editors. Eclipse and
> Netbeans are probably the most successful open source IDEs, and they
> support tons of languages through plugins, which gives them a large base
> of users outside the Java community. I suspect the way to be a
> successful IDE is to emulate them.

It's not because lots of people like big IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans 
that it's the only right way to build a development environment. See Vim 
and Emacs, for example, they are also really successful in the free 
software world.

But I'm not fully satisfied by big IDEs or general-purpose text editors.

Imagine that creating a text editor like gedit takes 1000 lines of code.  
It's almost nothing. It will probably never happen, but if it happens 
one day, it will be really easy to create independent text editors, 
specialized for only one language (or a set of related languages). The 
UI, the features, the settings: all that is tailored to the target 
language. You just start the application, and after only a few minutes 
of configuration, it works for your project. You want at the same time 
to write a LaTeX report and to work on a C project, no problem, you use 
two different applications, with different settings, etc. Instead of 
creating a complex configuration file with Vim for instance.

I think it is worth exploring this path. Maybe I'm wrong. But maybe it 
can provide a really good developer experience.

And by following this path now, we can already simplify the code in 
gedit, Anjuta and other text editors.

Best regards,
Sébastien