Hi Sergii,
More than 15 years ago I joined the GNUstep development because I like
NeXT's OS design, look and feel. At that time my dream was to return
NeXTSTEP desktop to Linux. After 15+ years my dream still alive. I
understand that GNUstep project goals somewhat changed over these
years. And this is good until project is interesting to broad kind
(goals, tastes) of people involved in it's development.
Exactly... actually I think "the goal" didn't change for everybody, just
for some and we have many dreams, but the core still sticks together!
The next step is to build Frameworks, then Appplications. You can
create new user with all needed files inside it's home dir. You can
start Login with command 'systemctl start loginwindow' or login to
newly created user from your login application (it should start
~/.xinitrc in user home dir). That's it.
Some noticeable achievements I've got:
* I integrated Workspace and WindowMaker into Workspace Manager.
That's it - one application. It was made possible by using libdispatch
and libobjc2. For example, when non-GNUstep application starts
Workspace's Processess panel shows it with info grabbed from
WindowMaker. Another example: when you start application by
double-clicking in File Viewer and appicon already exists in Dock icon
fly from FileViewer's to docked appicon.
* In general Workspace is ready to be NSWorkspace povider.
* GNUstep and WindowMaker unified look and feel (menus and titlebars,
fonts, miniwindows).
* Media management: Workpace automatically mounts removable media
inserted (UDisks integration).
* Terminal: a lot of improvements. It's better to see it.
* -NXAutoLaunch option implemented. Now applications started with this
option doesn't show menu at all. No focus flickering. Smooth as it
should be.
* Preferences: everything you need to set up must be here. Not only
GNUstep NSGlobalDomain options (localization, fonts) but system
specific options also (display, keyboard, mouse, sound, networking).
* A lot of other things I can't recall now but I write it down someday. ;)
This sounds great and the screenshots look promising
There are some facts I don't like and want to change:
* NEXTSPACE is based on quite outdated release of GNUstep (base
1.24.8, gui and back 0.24.1);
* It is based on ART backend. I want to use Cairo backend but ART has
usefull features (.nfont packages provide ability to set hinting and
antialiasing options on per font basis).
I understand that! ART continues to be intriguing and it still works
after many years, it is fast, fotns look better and the possibility of
using non-antialiased fonts is just great. They look far better in
Terminal, Code-Editors and for my test also Menus.
* DE needs documentation. I plan to discuss NSHelpPanel implementation
with you guys. First of all we need to define format for help files.
Indeed, this is a cross-GNUstep issue. We don't have documentation and
the HelpViewer app we had long time ago disappeared into void.
One solution would be to revive it and to use RTF: this would be cool
because you can read and write it with GNUstep tools and it would be
low-resource.
ANother would be to go more apple-like and use HTML, but you need an
external editor and also no native viewer for GNUstep. Maybe in the
future pull in the monstrum of WebKit or it could use SWK if it were a
little more complete. It is capable enough to "almost" display our
GNUstep reference libraries, except for a couple of issues. Might be
worth it.
A discussion worth of a separate thread.
* It is developed and tested on CentOS 7. I have no plans in near
future to port it somewhere else. I need to finish what I've started
first.
Understandable, also your solution looks quite linux tied and depends on
a couple of nasty things, but nevertheless very interesting for a lot of
people.
Clean up headers, copyrights and such. This is very important if you
want your application to be ever packaged in a distribution.
2. Return to development of ProjectCenter. First of all PC badly needs
good editor, then GORM interoperation and next debugger.
I took over maintainership of ProjectCenter after your leave. I
stabilized the application quite a bit, but not totally.
With hard work I fixed crashers in the editor and improved the class and
syntax parsers. With Gregory we started a debugger, the first iteration
was simple and not portable, the second (not yet released, it is in GIT)
is interesting, but hard to complete and work halted a bit because of
these issues.
If you wish we can sync on that if you are interested.
I hope my work will be useful not only for me but for GNUstep project
also.
A good application is useful for everybody and attracts interest. Maybe
some of your improvements can also directly go into the application you
started from?
E.g. I think we should also have an exchange on Terminal, because I put
quite some work there. I took over a couple of years ago.
Happy Coding,
Riccardo
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