[Geany-devel] "Auto-close quotes and brackets" - addition request

[ioguix at free.fr]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2009, Enrico Tröger wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:41:18 +0100 (CET), ioguix at free.fr wrote:
>
>>
>> On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Thomas Martitz wrote:
>>
>>> Enrico Tröger schrieb:
>>>> This all seems kind of weird and hard to fix all cases. I'm afraid a
>>>> sane implementation would cause a painful amount of extra code :(.
>>>>
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Enrico
>>>
>>> This feature has been proven to be good in theory, but bad in
>>> practice anyway. At least for me. It's basically not usable on any
>>> language which needs some kind of statement terminator, such as C
>>> and its ;.
>>>
>>> I see how it might be useful for other languages, but you still need
>>> to move the cursor behind the auto-inserted char to be able to hit
>>> enter to get to the next line. And I actually don't see a difference
>>> in typing " or moving the cursor.
>>
>> There's at least one:
>> I have a reflex since some years now, that makes me closing immediatly
>> anything I am opening, quotes, braces etc...It's not even like I was
>> thinking about that, it really became a reflex now.
>>
>> Considering that, this patch actually makes me save some keystroke on
>> arrows. Consider this code print('blah'), I have to type 2 times on
>> left, 2 times on right. With the patch, I just have to move forward 2
>> times when I finished typing "blah", never go back.
>>
>> Considering some other editors got this kind of feature and that at
>> least one user found this patch useful on the geany ml, I guess some
>> other people have this same reflexe.
>>
>> But I just defend the practice here to answer your first sentence, not
>> the patch itself.
>> I discovered this feature was more complexe I used to think and
>> believe the first initial patch is incomplete. So if you guys decide
>> to withdraw it from the source I will definitly not mind.
>> As Enrico was pointing out, having a sane implementation of it would
>> need some more amount of extra code.
>> So maybe this is the signal to make us consider pushing this in a
>> plugin if feasable.
>> Though, I could try fixing the additionnal problems Enrico pointed
>> out. Actually the only problem I see presently is the one with
>> delete/backspace after autoclosing...
>
>
> Without answering the above issues, just a quick idea:
>
> what do you think about further developing of this feature in a branch
> or a plugin? I currently don't have time and energy for the
> patch-review-commit cycle.
> So, in a branch you could constantly improve it further when you have
> time and motivation.
> Or, maybe better, in a plugin which probably would result in more user
> feedback as it is more likely to be used as in a separate branch.
> I could create a quick plugin skeleton if you are interested.
>
> I think this way development could be faster and we can later merge it
> into Geany again or just keep it as a plugin.

Thanks for this proposal and sorry for my long non-answer...

Plugins sounds like a better way, as yuo say, a seperate branch would have 
very few users...

However, ISTM the biggest issue to this patch presently is to detect 
keystroke like delete/backspace and when moving the cursor in the 
document...Do you think I could get this kind of information from a plugin 
?

> Regards,
> Enrico

-- 
Guillaume (ioguix) de Rorthais