Re: Anjuta2 editor interface limitations

[Jeroen Zwartepoorte <jeroen xs4all nl>]

Hi Andy,

On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 13:00, Andy Piper wrote:
> Biswa wrote:
> > It seems that Anjuta2 uses a limited interface for the editor
> > (gdl/idl/editor-buffer.idl). Because of this, things like getting
> > current word, etc. are extremely inefficient
> [snip]
> 
> Very interesting. I was completely unaware of this - largely through 
> having spent no time getting to grips with the Anjuta2 codebase yet. 
> It is a very useful perspective.
> 
> > Another problem: there are no interfaces for telling the editor to do
> > stuff like show completion lists, calltips, etc. which are pretty basic
> > requirements for an IDE. Further, from what I got from the code, editor
> > gutters are implemented seperately from the editor. This, IMO, does not
> > make sense since editor gutters are an integral part of the editor GUI
> > (e.g. Scintilla).
> 
> Well of course, in the case of Anjuta2, the editor is Glimmer. This might 
> go some way to explaining the current design. However, ISTR talk of the 
> editor component being "pluggable" via Bonobo, so we could use e.g. gvim 
> or Scintilla instead. The features you mention here are indeed very 
> important, and things which many Anjuta1 (and Visual Studio, Eclipse, 
> etc.) users are going to miss if they are not added to Anjuta2. 
>
> Now that Scintilla has been ported to GTK2, there's no reason why 
> someone couldn't take a stab at adding it to Anjuta2 - bringing with it 
> all the goodies like the gutter, easier word selection, and the functional 
> things which we've enjoyed when using it in Anjuta1.
> 
> There are disadvantages of course.
> - Scintilla is not a "GNOME project", unlike glimmer2
> - it is really hard to add new highlighting / language modes to 
> Scintilla, compared with glimmer (AFAIUI)
> - It would be a lot of work to integrate it (I imagine)

Integration is almost non-existant. Anjuta2 will "scan" for bonobo
controls that support the EditorBuffer interface on startup. It then
puts those controls in a nice little combo at the bottom of the editor
control so you can switch on the fly to a different editor.

> One of the long standing requests from Anjuta1 users was either the 
> use of the gvim embeddable component thingy, or vi-style keybindings. 
> If Anjuta2 ever reaches a wider audience, these kind of calls will 
> crop up here too.

Keybindings might not be related to a specific control. AFAIK (which
isn't much about this), you can define/change keybindings throughout
GNOME2 itself via the "keybindings capplet".

> > Please let me know what you think on this issue.
> 
> All good points. I hope there can be a more active discussion of 
> similar issues on this list.

Same here.

Jeroen