On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 11:51:29AM -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote: > I'm all for moving more features from gedit into gtksourceview, since > that benefits all users of gtksourceview, but I'm not sure that I agree > with your argument in favor of specialized text editors. Eclipse and > Netbeans are probably the most successful open source IDEs, and they > support tons of languages through plugins, which gives them a large base > of users outside the Java community. I suspect the way to be a > successful IDE is to emulate them.
It's not because lots of people like big IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans that it's the only right way to build a development environment. See Vim and Emacs, for example, they are also really successful in the free software world. But I'm not fully satisfied by big IDEs or general-purpose text editors. Imagine that creating a text editor like gedit takes 1000 lines of code. It's almost nothing. It will probably never happen, but if it happens one day, it will be really easy to create independent text editors, specialized for only one language (or a set of related languages). The UI, the features, the settings: all that is tailored to the target language. You just start the application, and after only a few minutes of configuration, it works for your project. You want at the same time to write a LaTeX report and to work on a C project, no problem, you use two different applications, with different settings, etc. Instead of creating a complex configuration file with Vim for instance. I think it is worth exploring this path. Maybe I'm wrong. But maybe it can provide a really good developer experience. And by following this path now, we can already simplify the code in gedit, Anjuta and other text editors. Best regards, Sébastien _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
