[Geany-Users] Ruby indent not working

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 17.01.2013 23:00, schrieb Colomban Wendling:
> Le 17/01/2013 22:00, Thomas Martitz a écrit :
>> Am 17.01.2013 21:28, schrieb Lex Trotman:
>>> On 17 January 2013 23:02, Sayth Renshaw <flebber.crue at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi
>>>>
>>>> [...]
>>>>
>>>> Not sure if I have missed something Ruby specific
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Well, sort of, or rather Geany has missed something, Ruby specific
>>> support for indenting :)
>>>
>>> Geany autoindent is almost language independent, it knows how to:
>>>
>>> 1. go to the same indent as last line
>>> 2. indent and unindent on { and }
>>> 3. as a special case only, indent on : in Python
>>>
>>> None of these will work for Ruby IIUC.
>>>
>>> What it needs is for someone to specify the algorithm, and to provide
>>> a plugin that implements it (such language specific stuff shouldn't be
>>> in core)
>>>
>> I disagree.
>>
>> This is something that ought to be in the core, really. Language support
>> is a core feature of Geany (and any IDE). It should work out of the box
>> and not reside in disabled-by-default extensions. Especially if python
>> can have its special case in the core.
> Nope, I don't think so.  Actually I wish we support (someday) "filetype
> plugins", e.g. a plugin that provides highlighting, tag parsing and any
> other kind of useful language-specific features.  Maybe those plugins
> should indeed be automagically loaded when opening a file using that
> plugin's language, but it'd be great if the features where in a separate
> entity.
>
> Why?  Well, there are many reasons:
>
> * It would use less resources: even though each filetype would probably
> use more resources because of the plugin and loading thingie, nobody
> uses 100 languages at the same time, nor in the same Geany run.
>


If everything is phased out to plugins it can become a threat to Geany's 
main goal: Be fast & lightweight. It threatens "fast" calling into a 
shared library has a performance overhead, and for some things that 
overhead can become measurable or even noticeable (tag parsing or syntax 
highlighting are possible candidates). And it threatens lightweight, 
because the installation size grows significantly. Also, the .so files 
might be so large (just because they are .so files) that even loading a 
few uses more RAM than statically linking the code for all file types.

Reducing RAM usage _only_ is not the holy grail, especially in times 
were RAM is cheap and multi-gigabyte RAM setups are the standard.

Besides, IMO some langauge related stuff should be in the core because 
it's the most reliable way to provide a consistent experience across 
filetypes (though still not 100% reliable as we see in this bug report).

Furthermore, IMO, plugins should extend Geany's functionality. I would 
not consider enabling Ruby indentation as an extension, but rather a bug 
fix for something that should have worked out of the box since the 
beginning. In fact, it seems strange to invent a new plugin just for the 
purpose of fixing a bug in the core.

FWIW, could filetypes.conf provide block delimiters (similar to comment 
characters)? This would allow to remove the special cases itself out of 
the core code while still having the actual indentation code in the core.

Best regards.