Re: Text editors

[Martijn van Beers <martijn earthling net>]

On Wed, Jul 14, 1999 at 08:38:42AM -0400, thudson@cygnus.com wrote:
> Christopher Atlee wrote:
> > 
> > This is exactly what I'm suggesting :)  Provide a set of CORBA components,
> > each of which implements a standard Editor interface.  Then you can choose
> > the right tool for the job and leave the project developers to code their
> > project and not yet another text editor.
> > 
> 
> I've spent a lot of time working on how to interface external editors to
> IDEs. The previous interface I described handles probably 60 percent of
> the integration. For example, when a user clicks on a function or 
> method in a tree browser view, the browser calls the gotoFile method
> of the editor, with the file name, row, and column. The editor determines
> whether the file is already loaded, loads it if necessary, activates
> this window, and positions the cursor. The real difficulty comes in
> trying to design the interface for a debugger, since the debugger
> need to have the editor display things like breakpoints, etc.
 
Look at the desktop-editor.idl file in gnome-libs and the idl in
dryad and ggdb to see what people have come up with so far.

Desktop::Editor needs some serious work, and I'd like to get
some input :)

The debugger interface seems pretty good already, but I'm sure
the authors would like to hear any comments you have on that
too.

> For general application use, you also need the concept of a blocking
> gotoFile call, e.g. a mail program that needs to wait until the user
> is finished editing the file before continuing. 

I would think that a callback interface would be more generic
You would get callbacks like "file saved", "file closed", etc.

Martijn

-- 
Martijn van Beers
martijn@earthling.net

Zistance is Footile!