[Geany-devel] Greetings from an IDE refugee

[Nathan Broadbent]

Hello,

I'm a Ruby on Rails programmer with a bit of C and C++ experience.
I was using gedit 2.x & the gmate plugins happily for over a year, until
Ubuntu 11 decided to go to GTK3, and bump gedit to 3.x. All my plugins are
no longer compatible, so I decided that it was about time to find a new
editor.

I've tried all the editors I can find, and I've decided that Geany wins.
But I'm not completely satisfied with it, and there's plenty of things I'd
like to work on. Here's my list:


1) I'd like to expand the behaviour of 'Auto-close quotes and brackets',
and make it work like the 'Pair char autocomplete' gedit plugin -
http://code.google.com/p/gedit-pair-char-autocomplete/:

The plugin is smart enough to automatically overwrite existing closing
brackets when appropriate. Selecting a block of text and typing an opening
parenthesis or quote character will enclose the selection in quotes or
parenthesis.


2) I'd like to fix a weird bug with 'haml' templates - Any file that starts
with an '=' character is treated as a giant comment. This destroys syntax
highlighting for most of our haml files. I can't figure out why this is
happening.

3) I really like the TreeBrowser plugin. In fact, I really wouldn't have
considered Geany if it didn't exist. So I'd like to add file-system
monitoring to auto-refresh directories, and cut/copy/paste of multiple
files. I think a file browser is a pretty critical feature of any editor,
so I was also wondering if this plugin deserves to be merged into core.

4) I would love to write some plugins in Ruby. The GeanyLua plugin could be
a good base for this, but it would be great if the core had native bindings
for Python and Ruby.

5) I'd love to see more 'Ruby on Rails'-related plugins, such as test suite
integration (RSpec/Cucumber), built-in Rails API documentation (similar to
railsapi.com), and caching/invoking rake & capistrano tasks. It would also
be nice if the compile/build buttons could be automatically hidden while
editing a scripting language.

6) It would be cool to have some simple integrations with git and github.


Well, those are some of the things I'd like to work on. Thanks to everyone
who has worked on Geany so far! It's a great IDE, and I look forward to
contributing.


Regards,
Nathan B
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