Re: editor settings list

[Chris Phelps <chicane reninet com>]

On 24 Aug 2001 16:31:49 +0200, jeroen wrote:
> OK, so we delay creating generic & specific preferences groups until we
> have more than 1 editor component.

Im working on this with 100% of my coding time right now. In 2 days I
have gotten to about 70% usability with my GlimmerFile bonobo control
that is based loosly around the current scintilla control. There is
currently no highlighting or mime-type specification, but that will be
coming soon enough...tonight if I can manage a couple hours of hacking
time before my eyes stop working :-)

> I've been thinking about this some more and all i can come up with is
> this: simply have 2 tab-width settings, one for local and one for
> system-wide settings. This is the only way that i can see that it would
> work.

In Glimmer I have 2 dialogs: one for all the main settings, and one for
some specific settings on a per-file basis which *can* over-ride the
main settings if specified. Glimmer is made for mixing a lot of
different types of code, which maybe gIDE is not, but I believe that we
should allow for this possibility in the design so that we dont have to
go back and fix it later.

On another note, Glimmer used to have a basic tabbed preferences dialog
that was generally quite nice to look at, but at some point it became
way to big (bigger than 640x480) and I decided that I would have to
change to another style in order for things to work better on systems
with lesser resolutions. gIDE in its current stage is already setup to
have more tabs than I had with Glimmer, so I think it would be a good
idea to start out with an expandable interface for the property dialog.
The style I speak of is used in Galeon, Glimmer, and several other
programs that have a greater degree of configurabilty than standard
GNOME apps.

Another idea that I have come up with is a generic idl that compatable
controls could implement that would be something like this:

GtkWidget *getSettings(void *data)

void getDefaults(void *data)

void applySettings(void *data)

Dont bother about the use of C types, I dont feel like thinking about
idl's right now...Im pretty new to this stuff and it doesnt quite flow
through my brain properly.

Basically what we have here is an interface where we could query a
control for a box widget filled with it's preferences, which we would
then place in the main gIDE settings dialog. When we get an ok or apply
signal, we would then call the control's apply function with the data
that was passed in from the getSettings function. The data of course
would be whatever the control needed to keep track of its
preferences...pointers to widgets, etc.

When I get the GlimmerFile control working smoothly, I will let you all
know so that more consideration can go into the Editor Settings
discussion.

Later,
Chris
--

http://glimmer.sourceforge.net - My pet project
http://uberhackers.dhs.org - My personal website

./configure --prefix=/dev/mocha --enable-caffeine