On 13-10-11 02:23 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Am 11.10.2013 07:01, schrieb Matthew Brush:
notebooks". 99% of the now hardcoded places will work fine, e.g. I'm using gtk_widget_get_parent(sci) to get a doc's notebook and implement a foreach_notebook() macro. So this should make it really trivial to support even more than 2 notebooks.
gtk_widget_get_parent(sci) makes a big assumption; that the Scintilla will be packed directly into a notebook. Plugins can easily break this assumption by reparenting the Scintilla widget, and even my document-messages branch moved each Scintilla into a VBox inside each tab so it could pack a GtkInfo bar above it. I think we could get rid of this assumption by designing the code better.
Okay, I have written a function that walks the tree to find the parent notebook. So this assumption is no more. Thanks for the hint.
You don't need to walk any tree's, if you need to notebook from the scintilla, just store a pointer to the notebook in the scintilla, ex. using g_object_set_data() or more painfully by subclassing it.
Please don't write another foreach_ macro. Lets make it so we can use normal C code. If you need a macro like foreach_notebook() it's probably because the code it's hiding is crappy underlying code, IMO.
I like foreach_*, and many other people do. I guess it's subjective. Plus it will make the transition from "main and secondary notebook" to "array of N notebooks" easier.
What's the problem with just using C code?
for (size_t i=0; i < notebooks_arr->len; i++) { // just normally use elements in the GPtrArray (as example) }
Such macros not only make for weird APIs but also do weird stuff with arguments since it's just textual replacements.
But still, I personally don't have a need for more than 2 notebooks. Plus I see it will be difficult to support, because you need to nest GtkPaneds. Since you suggest arbitrary splits you can do this only programmatically which sounds like a major headache to me (especially w.r.t. saving/restoring state). For now I want to concentrate on lifting the hardcoded single notebook without ending up in the same situation for two ones and without worrying about the heavy case of arbitrary notebook placing. Then we can continue from there on with more sophisticated stuff.
However if you have already successfully implemented this in a toy editor I welcome you to join the fun.
Just to be clear, regarding the split window feature in my toy editor, I only coded the UI logic, not any of the storing config of what panes were open or what documents they had in them and more complicated stuff like this. But the UI was indeed quite neat. SublimeText also has a similarly flexible split pane system.
Okay, so you stopped ater the easy parts :P
Yep :)
All of those functions in document_ module shouldn't care the least about GTK+ or even notebooks, IMO. This is the type of stuff I want to cleanup.
There are also many direct uses of main_widgets.notebook, changing these might (or might not) affect plugins.
IMO, if you're going to break the plugin API anyway, I say make it good and we'll fixup core and GP plugins and make a message on the mailing list for other users to know what broke and how to fix it in their own personal plugins.
It's not yet clear to me how bady (or if at all) the API is going to break..
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.
IMO, least amount of changes is not necessarily a virtue, and can even lead to further gluing of the code together making future changes even harder.
But it's better than not getting the job done at all because people want to much at once.
Yeah, but I wonder. Sometimes just patching on more changes adds to the number of bugs and code weirdness at least as much as just refactoring the code being patched on to. Of course if you just want to tack on a quick feature this is desirable, but if you want to improve the overall code quality, it's arguable.
So, any opinions?
It sounds like you already are planning some of this, but it would be nice to cleanup a lot of the assumptions/hardcoded stuff/weirdness while making these fairly intrusive changes. For example:
- The relationship between documents and notebooks they're in, as you
discussed. As Lex mentioned, it would be nice to not make too much new hard-coded assumptions about other documents only being allowed in another notebook, but rather making it extensible to support multiple windows in the future. Also as I mentioned, it would be nice to not make any hard-coded assumptions about only having two split notebooks[1].
gtk_widget_get_parent(doc->editor->sci) without hardcoding. I'm using this where possible.
You're still hardcoding, just a different assumption as mentioned above.
The notebook of a doc can be retrieved via - The relationship between documents (models) and Scintilla (views), they should be almost completely independent. There shouldn't need to have document->editor->scintilla, the document needn't care what view it's in, only the reverse. I have no idea where GeanyEditor fits into this, I've never understood why it exists; it's not a view, it's not a model, and it's not really a controller either, it's like part wrapper over Scintilla, part extension of GeanyDocument or something like this I guess?
Sorry, I think this item is out of scope for this work. FWIW, I don't quite understand the deal about GeanyEditor either.
It's not out of scope, but it is way more work than I think you're personally prepared to do. It's basically the reason no one fixed the split window before or worked to moving it into core, because it was too much work with the current way it's coded. If this kind of stuff gets cleaned up first, the split window thing becomes trivial (as well as multi-window, etc). I would've fixed up split window myself 10x by now if I didn't morally have to cleanup all this code to do it correctly.
See, if you make this kind of cleanup a hard requirement that no progress is going to happen, for the reasons you mention. Can't we just progress with managable portions of cleanups/workload, considering our already heavily limited developer manpower?
Yep, that's why my previous message, I'll try not to interfere here too much since no one is interested in the type of stuff I'm talking about probably (cleanup up the code en masse).
The cleanup you propose would be impossible for me to do anyway, because I have no vision how the end result would look like. Without such a vision I wouldn't know where to start and where to end. As I said, I don't know about the GeanyEditor deal but I don't have a problem with it either. And splitwindow can be done with the current structures. So I maintain that your proposal is out of scope for my work. The same goes for your other cleanup proposals.
The patterns and paradigms used in IDE software and editors are not new, we aren't paving new ground here, usually we're just fighting it by not using the tools at our disposal for artificial reasons (totally off-topic).
- Encapsulating the GeanyDocument so that plugins can't mess with
read-only members. For example, it makes no sense to allow plugins to change doc->read_only, or doc->file_name (one of them actually does this). It would be nice to make the API consistent here, like we have document_set_text_changed() to mark the document as ditry/clean, but there's no getter like document_get_text_changed(), which is inconsistent and it allows plugins to seriously break Geany if they aren't careful. This one is of course fairly off-topic and could be attacked separately afterwards, I just thought it was worth mentioning since you talked about needing to break the plugin API, it might be useful to improve it during the breakage.
Also unrelated. I agree that big API breakage should be as rare and concentrated as possible (i.e. within a single release) but not as part of a single change. Let's not blow this splitwindow work up with unrelated changes. This would just make review impossible and cost more time to get done.
The fact that it "blows up" into more work is exactly why we should bite bullet instead of keep "just making it work with minimal changes", when the code is factored well, making changes becomes easier. But I digress somewhat (as usual).
I withdraw my request to help out with this because I don't think you're interested in doing some of the bigger underlying changes I was interested in doing before attempting to fixup split window, and I don't want to drag you down. As long as you keep in mind the stuff mentioned, and don't make any additional same type of assumptions that were made and evolved previously, I think it won't be such a big deal to do the stuff I was talking about underneath your changes as a separate initiative later on.
Right, I'm not interested in doing the bigger cleanups. For three reasons: (a) my time is limited and I want to get splitwindow done more than anything else (w.r.t. to Geany) currently. (b) unlike you I have no vision how the cleanup should look like. (c) I have no problem with the current code base (yet).
(a) yep, just throw another patch on it, it's not going to much change situation and it at least adds a highly desirable feature.
(b) I usually just study how other IDEs and editors work and are coded. As mentioned, this is not new territory, we have footprints to follow.
(c) A lot of it is intertangled and is the result of starting with no design and then tacking on another feature, and another feature and so on. Don't get me wrong, it works very well, but anytime you go to make any non-trivial change to the source you end up opening a whole can of worms or just patching on another hack because you don't have a week to refactor the code, I'm as guilty as anyone...
You aren't willing to do the cleanups either, as you noted before. So I'm not actually sure what you're after.
I'm willing to actually *do* the cleanups, I'm just not up to the task of bikeshedding over every line of code in excruciating detail by people who won't even add your remote and test and push you some changes for stuff they don't like (I don't exclude myself here). It's a grueling way to accept contributions, which is why I said I will mostly stay out of the way.
I actually use the current crippled split view *extensively* so I would also be really interested in helping out with this. If it was useful we could make a branch on the main repository to work from and get more visibility with it probably.
Fine with me. You can also make PRs on my github until this is set up (but beware that I still amend and rebase) :)
I can still make a branch for this but as mentioned above I won't be contributing much to it as it stands. I will be a good tester though because I *really* want a fully functional split window :)
I appreciate testing. But right now it's still a long road.
Cheers, Matthew Brush
Thanks for your input.
Sorry to be such a downer, I just really hate seeing this vicious circle of adding more and more code ontop of other code that needs to be refactored, making everything all intertwined and hard to hack on.
Well, it needn't get worse that status quo. See it as part of incremental cleanup. Why are you so pessimistic about that?
It truly isn't worse than the status quo, I just debate that the status quo needs to continue forever.
Cheers, Matthew Brush