Hello,
I just wanted to let you know that I'm working on a new splitwindow implementation and I would like to have early input. But, also as a warning, I'm progressing only slowly because I'm at the final phase of my master thesis which currently needs more attention that Geany hacking.
Anyway, we all know about the limitations of the splitwindow plugin. They include (not a complete list): - the other view can only have one document - you cannot undo/redo: you need to select the tab in the main notebook to do that - state is not saved/restored across Geany restarts - it's completely awkward because the other view shows a doc that's also in the main view, editing in the other view will change the main view at the same time. - you cannot toggle between the views with a keybinding (e.g. ctrl+tab) - weird focus behavior - more...
My plan is to reimplement splitwindow using a different approach: by having two real, independemt notebooks, one primary and one seconary.
New docs will be opened in the primary one by default, but can be moved to the secondary one at will. This means that no document can be shown in both at the same time which makes it a loss less awkward. It also lets us lift the other limitations: - undo/redo will work - state can be saved across restarts (config file format will probably need some changes for this) - toggling with keybindings between views can work - you can arbitrarily assign docs to views using different methods
The nice things about splitwindow that should be probably be kept: - chose between horizontal and vertical split - automatic sizing of the views - anything else?
Unfortunately Geany's core is pretty hardcoded as to assume one (and only one) notebook for documents. This means that for this various changes to Geany core are necessasry, some of which may be difficult to do without breaking the plugin API/ABI. Some are gonna hate this but I'm not currently planning do this as a plugin because the core needs a lot of changes anyway for breaking the single notebook assumption. But I'm very open for discussion which is why I'm writing this early.
I already have an experimental version up and running that doesn't even require all that much changes[1] and it seems to work nicely. See this[2] screenshot.
So, any opinions?
[1]: https://github.com/kugel-/geany/tree/splitwindow2 [2]: http://www.alice-dsl.net/simonemartitz/default/splitwindow2.png
Best regards.