[Geany-devel] Greetings from an IDE refugee

Lex Trotman elextr at xxxxx
Sat Nov 26 09:21:23 UTC 2011


On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 7:23 PM, Nathan Broadbent <nathan.f77 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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:

Hi Nathan,

Contributions welcome.

>
> 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.

Certainly you could use a plugin to provide an improvement in
auto-closing braces etc.  In general these days it is preferable that
all language specific parts go in plugins so they don't interfere with
other languages.  Since braces are shared by all the C refugee
languages :) a plugin for that would probably get much use.

As a personal note I find autoclosing a PITA and don't use it, YMMV.

>
> 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.

What filetype are you using for haml since it isn't a supported
filetype?  It is possible that whichever highlighting analyser you use
doesn't fully understand haml (or it just has a bug :).  The lexers
are part of the editing component Geany uses from the scintilla
project (see http://www.scintilla.org/ ) so if you find a bug you
should report it there.

> 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.

Well, lots of us don't think it is needed in an IDE at all, most
desktops have a browser already, and it runs in another window on
another screen making much better use of my screen real estate.  And
selecting files there opens them in Geany fine.

By all means implement improvements for the treebrowser plugin, but it
is unlikely to be added to core (especially as even the more limited
filebrowser included with Geany is a plugin, not 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.

A Python plugin plugin is in progress. See
https://github.com/codebrainz/geanypy

> 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.

Feel free to provide :)

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

There is a VCS plugin that supports git.  What do you mean by github
integration?

> 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.

Cheers
Lex


>
> Regards,
> Nathan B
>
>
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