[Geany-devel] Persistency

[Stephan Aßmus]

Am Montag, den 15.12.2008, 13:37 +0000 schrieb Nick Treleaven:
> On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:28:00 +0100
> Stephan Aßmus <superstippi at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> > this is my first mail to this list, so I want to tell you that Geany
> > is quite a cool editor and IDE. Although I am using it as an editor
> > only, since the project format of the project I am working on does
> > not seem to be supported (cmake). I searched the archives a bit and
> > saw that someone is working on a cmake plugin.
> 
> Geany doesn't support any build systems really. Projects are not for
> managing build systems.

I was just trying to explain why I couldn't use Geany's project feature.


> > have closed meanwhile, the scrollbar and cursor are at the top of the
> > file, the selection is lost. Wouldn't it be much better if that
> 
> The selection and precise scrollbar position are currently not saved
> with sessions. Cursor position is.

Would be nice, though. Although selection may be off when the file
contents change through an external app.

> > persistency information were stored with each individual files
> > instead? Can't file metadata/attributes be used for this? (That being
> > said, I don't even know if Ubuntu has xattr support turned on by
> > default...) That method would be much more robust and scalable.
> 
> Not sure if it would be portable then.

I think the Linux kernel will support it through an emulation layer, if
the filesystem has no support or has it turned off (at least so I
heard). So it's more a matter of wheather the API is available. But
what's the alternative, anyways? It would mean to create and maintain a
separate settings file for each file Geany ever opened (or some
database). And if the file is moved/renamed, there go the settings.
Worse yet, settings files will linger for files which may have long been
deleted. No, storing the settings *with* the file is really the only
solution. If the kernel or filesystem don't have support for metadata,
bad luck.

> This could be done as a plugin to handle support for persistency when
> any file is closed/reopened. Probably this shouldn't be in the core.

Ok, I may look into writing my own plugin then, I guess. Already needed
to build Geany from source to get the newest version... persistency is
really something very important to any application that deals with
documents, and if it's missing, it's very annoying for the user.
Obviously I'm under time pressure, so I can't promise anything... and
when I am done with my current project, I don't have to use Linux
anymore and the system I normally use has metadata support everywhere
and all the apps use it, so my pressure for this feature in Geany is
then much lower...

Anyways, don't get me wrong though, Geany is very nice otherwise. :-)

Best regards,
-Stephan