Hi All,
I wanted comment/respond to a message on user list that is completely
off-topic (development related). I don't know how to do it in
Thunderbird so hopefully I didn't mess up the threading too bad:
---
On 13-03-01 05:24 AM, Frank Lanitz wrote:> Am 01.03.2013 05:10, schrieb
Lex Trotman:
>> FWIW I think Matthews suggestion of removing vte and using multiterm
>> is the "right" solution, then only multiterm depends on libvte and it
>> can be a hard depends.
>
> I like the normal terminal more than multiterm to be honest (sorry
> Matthew ;) ).
>
No worries, and to clarify what I probably didn't express clearly to Lex...
I like the multiple tabs in MultiTerm (obviously, that's why I made it),
but to even be close to a viable alternative to built-in VTE, it needs
to integrate better with Geany like running execute command in it,
receiving text from Scintilla buffer, other misc GUI integration, and to
be completely re-written in C instead of Vala.
I'd rather see a plugin _similar_ to MultiTerm providing a multi-tabbed
terminal (but in C) as a core Geany plugin if it could provide the old
features. The user experience would be the same or better[1] and we
could get rid of all dependencies on VTE in core[2] and generally clean
up all kinds of compile/run time checks and VTE-related code necessarily
mixed about Geany's code currently.
I think writing such a plugin would be relatively easy compared to
safely removing VTE from core code, which seems rather difficult and
error-prone. It would be interesting to start an experimental branch
that didn't touch core at all (yet) and made a core plugin equivalent to
the builtin VTE. If it could implement all of the existing functionality
as well as multi-tab support, IMO it would cross the threshold of being
worthwhile to replace the builtin VTE.
I imagine it would be easy enough to keep such a branch in sync with
master during development since there's very little overlap as a plugin.
Also, if it doesn't work out, it could be easily abandoned without
affecting main branch at all.
±1? Thoughts? comments? Anyone want to work on it?
If anyone shows enthusiasm I could start a wiki page giving a bit of a
"plan of attack" in case people want to help out and to collect ideas.
I'm moderately interested in working on this myself in the near
future[3], and also possibly extending it to include a Windows "Command
Prompt"-like alternative using Win32 console API.
P.S. Sorry for such a long email, it's difficult for me to express all
of this concisely in English[4].
Cheers,
Matthew Brush
[1] Especially if there is or could be a way to have core plugins loaded
by default, if supported/available.
[2] VTE doesn't seem worthy for Geany core to depend on since it doesn't
work on most operating systems (except UNIXey ones not including OSX in
my experience).
[3] Especially if no one objects and I don't have to do it alone :)
[4] Yes, it's my native language, but it still sucks