[Geany-Devel] RFC: Keybindings rewrite

Thomas Martitz kugel at xxxxx
Sun Jun 8 12:04:16 UTC 2014


Am 08.06.2014 00:35, schrieb Colomban Wendling:
> Le 06/06/2014 16:17, Thomas Martitz a écrit :
>> Hello,
>>
>> based up on Matthew's fine GtkActions branch [1]
> We probably should not define the actions in the Glade file but rather
> in the code, they aren't really a UI thing but should reflect what the
> app can do basically.  Basically it's rather a replacement for our
> send_command() rather than simply keybindings.
>
>> I think we could
>> realistically rewrite keybindings.c use GtkAction/accelerators properly.
>>
>> Currently it re-implements lots of gtk stuff, such as the actual looping
>> through the known keybindings for the callback when a keybinding
>> pressed. When this would be rewritten keybindings.c could probably be
>> half as large (in LOC terms).
> Yes, current handmade keybinding is suboptimal, and GtkAction is
> probably a good idea.  However, we need to make sure it doesn't remove
> feature on the way, because we have some tricky handling in some cases
> AFAIK.
>
>> The advantage of doing so would be that plugins could register
>> keybindings simply by providing a GtkAction instance (and optionally a
>> GtkMenuItem) instead of a plain callback. This would enable to handle
>> keybindings in a more natural (from a glib/gtk POV) form through
>> signals. This is especially interesting for non-C plugins because it
>> easier to support/implement a gobject-based API then a
>> function-pointer-based one. This is the major reason I'm interested in
>> this.
>>
>> I think it is possible to do this without breaking the API or at least
>> without actual damage because plugins don't use the fields of
>> GeanyKeyGroup and GeanyKeyBinding so we can change these structs.
> Mmmmmokay, great.
>
>> Is such a rewrite desirable,
> If it doesn't lose features on the way, yes.
>
>> and would it have a realistic chance of
>> getting merged?
> It depends on how it is done I guess.  If it's incrementally mergeable,
> or if it's reasonably reviewable, yes.  If it changes 80% of Geany's
> internals in weird commits dropped on the end, it probably will be
> *really* hard to merge.
> For example, Matthew's commits are nice in the sense they are
> individual, but not in the sense each commit touches a lot of partially
> unrelated stuff.  It'd be easier to review the removals of some
> state-prefs, regardless of the action changes, and then the actions
> changing less code.

I can't comment on the reviewability of Matthew's changes, but for my 
part is I was planning to starting keybindings.c anew, with a single 
commit (hence I called it "rewrite") because I feel doing it from 
scratch yields better results than incrementally changing keybindings.c 
(and it'd take a lot less time). That said, the fundament is Matthew's 
changes which change the non-keybindings.c-code to work with GtkAction. 
You can consider this the first 80%, and my proposal the last 20%.

Of course the goal is to maintain the current APIs where it is sensible, 
or create similar/familiar APIs when not.

BTW, if you say now that Matthew's changes are unlikely to get into 
master in the short term then I see no point of starting my proposed 
rewrite.

Best regards.


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