[Geany-Devel] [FT-plugins] Allowing plugins to supply filetype specific functionality

[Matthew Brush]

On 2016-08-28 08:47 AM, Jiří Techet wrote:
> Hi Matthew,
>
> some random thoughts.
>
> I'm not sure I agree with doing lots of changes on a separate branch
> basically without any review. While you will be able to commit things fast
> to the branch, the most probable outcome will be the branch will get never
> merged because either nobody will be able to review the changes during
> merge or there will be some disagreement about something that could have
> been caught early. And then it's just lost effort.
>

A branch can be merged into master more than once (or we could use 
multiple-branches). No reason it has to happen in a single merge, or 
without any review.

> The individual points here
>
> https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/1195
>
> look like they should be able to do one by one. The most useful seems to be
> the code completion so this might be the one to start with. In parallel it

That or highlighting, not sure.

> would be good to develop a plugin that uses the new API and get it to a
> really usable state - you won't be able to tell what exactly you need for
> the plugin unless you have some working code. In parallel you can get some
> feedback from users and they will have something useful rather than lots of
> half-finished prototype features that aren't really usable.
>

I have previously started writing the CDK plugin[0] but gave up for the 
time being since most of what I wanted to implement either a) wasn't 
possible b) wasn't possible without ugly hacks or c) wasn't possible 
without the user manually disabling stuff in the prefs dialog and 
completely replacing the feature from the ground up.

I would probably like to use this as a proof of concept, although only 
having one plugin for one family of statically typed languages using one 
support library might not give the fullest view of what's needed.

> My other question is who wants to work on this? The issue mentions only
> those providing patches should be involved but is there anyone except you
> who will contribute patches? I confess this isn't very interesting for me -

We'll see. I know Columban has expressed interest (or at least stated 
that it's probably the best approach) in the past, not that that means 
he's interested in actively contributing to the effort. Anyone is 
welcome to contribute.

> I'm not so terribly tied to Geany and if I wanted e.g. a dedicated C++
> editor, I'd grab something else - you always get better language support if
> the editor is made specifically for your needs. I use Geany as a general

This isn't necessarily true, there's lots of language-agnostic 
editors/IDEs that people use that allow customized language support 
(vim, eclipse, emacs, etc). The problem with Geany is it doesn't allow 
any filetype customization besides what you can set in the filetypes.* 
files, it doesn't allow extension of any of the built-in features.

> purpose editor but otherwise use also Android Studio and XCode when writing

I sometimes use QtCreator when I need proper C/C++ support but it's 
annoying having to use an editor I don't like when I know that Geany can 
(and does now, just not well) do the same things with the assistance of 
language-specific support libraries.

> for Android or iOS. So no patches from me I'm afraid :-(. Apart from that
> this is a huge amount of work and I'm just lazy, sorry ;-)
>

That's fine. I don't expect it to be a _huge_ amount of work, but 
probably not a simple one-off PR. I expect it to be similar in scope and 
size to the proxy plugin improvements, most likely.

Cheers,
Matthew Brush

[0] https://github.com/codebrainz/cdk-plugin