Hi, folks.
Lex, thanks for your comments. I have heard before about GeanyLua's future being uncertain, and I did email the list suggesting that I would be willing to be an emergency backup maintainer. Ie I don't generally have the time, but given a choice between fixing a severe problem and losing the plugin, I'd step up.
Just tonight I've uploaded another script to the Geany Wiki, for surrounding the current selection with brackets, tags, etc. That fulfils another item from the plugin wishlist. It took about 40 lines (including comments and debug lines) and 15 minutes.
I strongly urge that GeanyLua be retained. I think that it and GeanyPy are the way of the future for plugin development, and since GeanyPy isn't available precompiled, GeanyLua is the only out-of-the-box candidate for developing a useful feature (that would normally involve a plugin) in an hour or less. The documentation is clear; the API is simple but effective; there's no boilerplate (no import statements, no class declarations, no metadata, just code); deployment is just a matter of copying the script into the geanylua directory and restarting/rescanning; and it integrates nicely with the keybinding system.
Anyone who wants to develop a plugin, or wishes for a feature that some other editor has, should consider GeanyLua. It might not do what they need, but if it does, they'll be able to do it within an afternoon. I'm already maintaining 6 different Lua-powered features (some of which involve multiple scripts), with a 7th to be uploaded soon, and it's easy.
Thrawn
--- On Wed, 5/6/13, Thomas Martitz thomas.martitz@student.htw-berlin.de wrote:
From: Thomas Martitz thomas.martitz@student.htw-berlin.de Subject: Re: [Geany-Devel] Lua script vs the plugin wishlist To: "Geany development list" devel@lists.geany.org Cc: "Lex Trotman" elextr@gmail.com, shell_layer-geany@yahoo.com.au Received: Wednesday, 5 June, 2013, 7:13 PM
Am 05.06.2013 06:34, schrieb Lex Trotman:
On 5 June 2013 13:19, Thrawn shell_layer-geany@yahoo.com.au wrote:
Hi, folks.
I took a look through the plugin wishlist recently, and it seems to me that a fair number of them could be solved quickly and easily using Lua scripting. Advanced interaction with Geany's chrome is out, but for text wrangling and integration with external tools, Lua scripts are effective, and they're extremely quick and easy to do.
I'm going to upload a 'delete duplicate lines' script to the Geany wiki soon, and then I plan to take a look at jumping to external functions in files that aren't open. FTP integration might be feasible too.
I could use GeanyPy, I suppose, and it's capable of more advanced stuff, but it's not available as a precompiled package, and the build process wanted to install over 100MB of python-dev dependencies...not really keen, nor would I want to impose that burden on end-users. I'll just pick the low-hanging fruit with Lua.
Hi,
Before you get too carried away, are you aware that the Lua plugin is orphaned and will be removed in the next release unless someone becomes maintainer?
Perhaps you should organise that first, if you want to be maintainer yourself then you need reasonable C skills and the time and interest to keep the plugin up to date, for example it currently does not work with GTK3. (I don't know how much is involved in that).
Cheers Lex
As I noted in the other thread, I still disagree that a plugin that seems to be working fine for a number of users should be removed from the release (until a severe bug occurs).
Best regards