[Geany-devel] Greetings from an IDE refugee

[Nathan Broadbent]

Hi Lex,

Thanks for your reply.

> 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.
>

I'll certainly write language specific parts in a plugin. Although, I
think the features I mentioned are pretty generic, especially
enclosing selected text in quotes or parentheses.


> 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.

I've tried ruby and yaml filetypes, but it seems like a 'default'
issue, even when `*.haml;` isn't defined anywhere. Thanks for pointing
out that Geany uses scintilla. I found a relatively promising thread
on their google group
(http://groups.google.com/group/scintilla-interest/browse_thread/thread/4220bfe6fbdf5e4d),
but it seems to have gone nowhere. I guess I have to get my hands
dirty with lexers :)


> 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).

Ok, that's fair enough. I agree that the 'minimal' mentality is a
great thing to preserve, so I will just implement those improvements
on the plugin. By the way, I'm really glad that the 'geany-plugins'
umbrella project exists. It's a really good idea, and I'll be keeping
it in mind for some of my other open source projects.


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

Awesome! If I write geanyrb, I will base it on this. Do you think it
might make sense to have an abstract script plugin, with a common API?
The Lua, Python and Ruby plugins could then share the same API.


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

Thanks for that, I didn't notice the GeanyVC plugin. Works great, and
I have a few ideas for improvements.
A Github integration would be pretty ambitious, but I guess I'm just a
Linux user who's a bit jealous of "Github for Mac"
(http://mac.github.com/)... It would be cool to have some of those
basic repo management features in my IDE.


Thanks again for your reply!

Cheers,
Nathan