Re: A Super Text Widget Thingy

[Bjorn Andersson <ban lifix fi>]

On Sat, Jan 01 2000, at 20:04:57 -0500, pbg1854@garnet.acns.fsu.edu wrote:
> I was thinking about XEmacs, and how it allows you to embed it as a
> widget inside your program, and I thought it would be really cool if
> GNOME/GTK+ had its own XEmacs type text editor widget that was
> completely scriptable, and acted completely consistently across
> apps. For example, suppose you decided to write an IDE with a built-in
> project manager and code editor, you could use this widget, which
> would provide syntax highlighting, and all the nifty stuff XEmacs
> does. Then, if you wrote a LaTeX-based document formatting program,
> you could use this widget as the main editor part of your program, and
> it would act similarly to XEmacs LaTeX mode. An email program could
> also use this widget. All the scripts written to provide these modes
> could be kept in a single directory, similarly to XEmacs lisp package
> library. I know we could probably hack XEmacs to work with GTK+, but
> it would probably be best to write one from scratch, to make it
> seamlessly join in with the rest of GTK+ and GNOME. Has anyone thought
> about doing something like this before? I think it would be really
> cool, and would be a great contribution to the GNOME project.

I have thought about this too, and I think it would be very useful. I
also support the idea of writing it from scratch. Then instead of using
only eg. elisp as the extension language, it should provide some kind
of plug-in mechanism that would allow extensions to written in any
language. (I, for instance, would prefer writing extensions in python).
The whole thing should probably be implemented as a bonobo component. 

Is there any project like this already? What is the right mailing
list to continue the discussion?

Best regards,
-- 
Björn Andersson  <bjorn@lifix.fi>                        +358-50-3412556
Lifix Systems Oy <http://www.lifix.fi/>     Professional Linux Solutions
Tekniikantie 21, FIN-02150 Espoo                          +358-9-4375272