[Geany-Devel] DevynCJohnson's Ideas (November)

[Lex Trotman]

> Geany Dev Team:
>
> Thank you Lex Trotman and Matthew Brush for your time, effort, and
> insightful feedback.
>
> Thanks Matthew for the QML link; I greatly appreciate it. I added the code
> to my system. Could we add this to the mainstream Geany? True, QtCreator may
> have better support, but some people prefer Geany over all IDEs (including
> me).

Is there a lexer that works *right* and/or a parser that works *right*
for QML?  If there are no parsers or lexers adding a filetype is
pretty much a waste of time.

>
> Okay. I just thought I could at least suggest FASTA. To me, it seems like a
> good idea, although very odd and unusual for a programming IDE. Sometimes, I
> like to make wild ideas because such ideas may become a "brilliant idea".
> However, I understand the team's viewpoint.
>
> True, one of  Geany's best features is that it is fast and light-weight.
> However, are there any benchmarks that indicate a significant performance
> drop when adding many file-extensions and file-types?

Adding extensions doesn't have a material cost, except that *the
filetype has to work* or it brings bug reports.  Adding filetypes has
some cost, particularly in the support of the filetype when Geany devs
don't know the language.

>
> Perhaps, a "plugin" could be made that has support for extra and "weird"
> file-extensions and file-types. Could Geany be modified to also look for a
> "filetypes_extension_extra.conf" file that would contain such
> file-extensions?

No point, all the extensions have to be loaded so Geany can check for
the extension of the file being opened to select the filetype
(assuming no magic incantations are present).

> For instance, an additional package could be made that
> contains "filetypes_extension_extra.conf" and various filetypes.*.conf
> files. If the user downloads and installs this package, Geany will see
> "filetypes_extension_extra.conf" and merge the contents to
> "filetypes_extension.conf" and load the related filetypes.*.conf files.

Packaging is not something Geany does, thats the distro's job.

What you could do is add custom filetypes that use existing lexers and
parsers to the wiki
http://wiki.geany.org/filetype?do=showtag&tag=filetype.  That makes
them available to others.

NOTE if a page already exists, add yours as another, do NOT overwrite
someone elses page, it will get yours reverted when it is noticed.

Such
> a feature may help us with development. For instance, we could use such a
> feature for testing proposed file and language support and provide
> "backported" and unstable file-extension support. As a specific example, the
> Manpage file-extensions I proposed could be added to such a package until
> Scintilla adds highlighting support for Manpages. Do you understand what I
> am saying? Would this be a possible idea to consider?

I don't think people should be editing manpage formats these days,
they should be using one of the lightweight markups that compile to
manpages.  There has not been a huge demand for editing manpages that
I'm aware of.  Again I emphasise that just adding filetypes brings a
support cost that detracts from other efforts.

>
> Will Not Add
>
> These are ideas that I will not add after hearing the team's viewpoints and
> after I have reconsidered and pros and cons.
>
> - *.ll: Good point, Matthew and Lex.
> - Python: Okay, I will not worry about the suggested extensions.
> - *.r: Thank you, Matthew, for pointing that out. I knew that R used the
> "*.R" extension, but I was unaware of "*.r".
> - XNA: I do not know XNA very well neither do I personally care about XNA. I
> just wanted to ensure that Geany supports XNA for those that do like XNA.
> However, since XNA is discontinued and I cannot find the specification, I
> will not add XNA. Unless, in the future, support is desirable.
> - Java Bytecode - I did more research, and I feel that this idea can be
> dropped.
>
> Lex, I assume you are joking about removing "XML=", right? In my opinion,
> XML support in Geany is a "must".

Oh I suppose so ;)

>
> Will Add Soon
>
> These are ideas that I feel are beneficial and that the team approves.
>
> - Add "*.f15;*.F15;" to "Fortran="
> *.f15 = Fortran 2015
> I do not know Fortran, but if highlighting does not work well with Fortran
> 2015, perhaps it will when Scintilla adds updates for this new Fortran
> standard
> http://fortranwiki.org/fortran/show/File+extensions
>
> - Add "*.xaml;" to "XML="
> XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language)
> This is a markup-language made by Microsoft
> XAML is used in .NET Framework 3 and 4
> Mimetype = application/xaml+xml
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Application_Markup_Language
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc295302.aspx
> https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/System.Windows.Markup.aspx

Again havn't seen the demand.

>
> - Adding "*.ii;" to "C++="
> *.ii - C++ source code which should not be preprocessed
> http://labor-liber.org/en/gnu-linux/development/extensions
>
> May Add/Consider
>
> These are ideas that I may reconsider, or I would like to hear your further
> thoughts.
>
> - *.s: True, the ASM lexer does not support AT&T syntax. However, if Geany
> recognizes the file-type, then the Assembly tools listed in the "Build" menu
> are available.

Are these assemblers the same command as that provided by the filetype?

> - *.i: *.i and *.ii are different. "i" is for C, and "ii" is for C++

Yes, but g++ still accepts and reads .i files as C++.

> - *.sed and *.awk: Sed and Awk are commonly used on Unixoid (Unix systems
> and Unix-like systems) systems. Are you sure that this idea should be
> dropped?

Do you have a working lexer or parser?

>
> Additional Comments
>
> By the way, I would like to thank everyone in the Geany Dev Team for their
> time, effort, and support. I am also thankful for being a part of the team.
>
> What must I do to earn a spot under "Contributors" in Geany's "Credits" tab
> of the "About" window?

I thought it was scraped from the commits, but I may be wrong.

>
> --
> Thanks,
> Devyn Collier Johnson
> DevynCJohnson at Gmail.com
>
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