Am 2012-10-18 09:17, schrieb Thomas Martitz:
First of all, I find the idea of Geany becoming the default text editor in some distro. The idea that a distro uses an IDE as a text editor by default is an acknowledgement for our goal to keep Geany lightweight.
I understand they want a simplified user interface. However, as Geany would be exposed to many newcomers, it should be clearly visible that this is not the real Geany (which is vastly more powerful). So IMO the name should express the difference (perhaps "Geany Lite"?). Otherwise the newcomers will think of Geany as a simple text editor, and not a powerful IDE and ultimately use another program for IDE tasks.
Just thinking about running it with a configuration flag, maybe also switchable inside Geany itself. Something like e.g. hide all sidebars which is already available as e.g. keybinding. So you could call something like geany --minimal and on running Geany you're ablt turn it to normal with a shortcut or something like that. Geany --minimal could also be just kind of a link to a minimal configuration file. Putting kind of a banner in top of Geany showing user he is only using a subset of features.
However, in the end it would be best and most important to avoid a fork, since that doesn't help us a bit.
ACK.
PS: I'm also not sure that a new wave of contribution will come from the Linux Mint side, seeing that they consider to fork gedit rather than to improve it collectively with upstream (but perhaps they just became hesitant to work with Gnome people?). He even suggested forking Geany in his very first approach to us.
They are used to "need to forking stuff" as you can see from cinnamon and mate desktops. And its a valid option to be honest -- even I dislike it ;)
Cheers, Frank