[Geany-Devel] Improving FiF

[Matthew Brush]

On 13-10-09 01:01 PM, Dimitar Zhekov wrote:
> Hi, all,
>
> I want to discuss how our FiF works, why, and possible improvements.
>
> 1. The FiF dialog is created programatically. Is there any reason for
> that, or simply nobody cared to XML-ize it? I'm not aware of anything
> that can be done gtk+ calls, but can't be done by loading a XML and
> less gtk+ calls.
>
> Proposition: move the presentation to glade as much as possible, and
> fill the content with code, as in any normal program.
>

I have done this before in a branch, but just the Glade part, which 
AFAIK is basically unmergable now because of volatility of Glade XML 
file. What I did was I made one single Search dialog in Glade that 
always showed the widgets that are in common between the various search 
dialogs (find, replace, fif), and then the specific options for the 
search type were each in their own container widget so they could be 
hidden/shown depending on which search dialog needs to be shown. There's 
some extra code to setup the dialog to be shown/work for the correct 
search type but it probably dwarfs the amount of code removed by putting 
all of them in the Glade file into a single DRY dialog.

>
> [snip]
>
> 3. For non-recursive searches, grep does not allow a directory to be
> specified instead of file. To work around that, we read the directory,
> back-parse all --include=*.x patterns, and match them manually.
>
> Proposition: grep -rl --include=*.c --exclude-dir=[^.]*
> --exclude-dir=.?* void . :)
>
> We pass our Directory as a workind  directory to spawn, and the
> recursive search already uses . as a grep FILE argument.
> --exclude-dir is supported since more than 5 years.
>

Is there any reason we cannot just walk the directory/subdirectories 
ourselves and search the files using GRegex stuff? The pattern syntax 
would then be the exact same as the other search dialogs and it would 
save having to not only spawn a subprocess but also remove the 
dependency on grep (only a problem on Windows). Also, as a future 
optimization, if any of the files to search are open in Geany, we could 
search their document buffer directly from memory rather than having to 
do any file IO for them. GIO/GFile has all the stuff needed to walk a 
directory tree and open files both asynchronously and portably IIRC.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush