Re: Improve word boundaries for text widgets

[Christian Hergert <christian hergert me>]

On 09/26/2014 06:13 AM, Sébastien Wilmet wrote:
> I would like to improve the word boundaries for the text widgets:
> GtkTextView, GtkEntry and GtkLabel (anything else?). More precisely the
> word boundaries used for word movements (Ctrl+arrow) and word selection
> (double click). Currently the behavior is not consistent across the text
> widgets in GTK+ (and other applications), and the current word
> boundaries don't work well with spaces, punctuations,
> variables_with_underscores, etc.

Awesome!

> By seeing how Vim handles word movements, I think it's a much better
> behavior. Deriving the "Vim" word boundaries from the Pango word
> boundaries is quite straightforward (I have a workable patch): it uses
> only the is_word_start and is_word_end PangoLogAttr attributes,
> g_unichar_isspace() and compare if a character is an underscore.

I'm doing exactly this in Builder today for VIM style `w` and `b`.

> Another idea for GtkTextView is to add a vfunc to let GtkSourceView
> define custom word boundaries for word movements and selection. But
> all what GtkSourceView would do is to define the "Vim" word boundaries,
> which are generic. The Vim word boundaries are good enough, we don't
> need more flexibility. So I prefer to implement directly the Vim word
> boundaries in GTK+, and have a consistent behavior with other widgets.

I would really like this to be a vfunc so that it could be handled by
per-language overrides in GtkSourceView/GtkSourceLanguage.

Additionally, I'd like double-click and triple-click to be different
things. Imagine triple-click selecting the whole scope in some C code
for example.

> Do you think it's a good plan?

I can't speak for everyone, but clearly useful for me on Builder.

-- Christian