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

[Enrico Tröger]

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.

Regards,
Enrico

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc
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