[Geany-Devel] [FT-plugins] Proposed "Features"

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 31.08.2016 um 17:26 schrieb Lex Trotman:
>> I think we all agree that help of language-specific plugins is
>> desired/required. No need to restate "we need language specific support" all
>> the time.
>>
>> We just disagree on how the language-specific knowledge is transported to
>> Geany, other plugins and the user.
>>
> Well, I read your previous comments such as "But *just* the data,
> don't offload very specific use cases onto them" (and to some extent
> this one too) as saying that all the plugin has to do is return some
> data (tags) and Geany will take it from there and all I was doing was
> making sure it was clear that its unlikely that Geany will be able to
> "take it from there" in any meaningful way, based purely on data,
> without filetype specific knowledge inside Geany.

Here we disagree. I think it is possible to extent TM/Geany sufficiently 
to encode this information in generic ways. As an example, template 
instantiation yields different types. TM could tread them as different 
types. Any variable will be of one of the types, so calltips would just 
work.

>
> Geany must ask the plugin for the answer for each element of
> functionality the plugin provides.  This means that those elements
> have indeed simply moved "Geany's deficiencies to the plugin space" as
> you put it.  This is good and necessary.

To me this is not good because it makes it impossible to use the 
information for other use cases in Geany or other plugins.

For example, I want to keep my quickswitch plugin that allows me to jump 
to arbitrary tags, even if a ft-plugin is doing all the hard work to 
parse them.

>
> Of course moving the problem to plugin space doesn't mean the plugin
> can't use Geany facilities where their capabilities fit the
> requirement.  But we should not try to expand Geany to handle all
> types of functionality.
>
> Like your TM query interface, the plugins should answer the questions
> like "whats the autocomplete here", "what calltips are relevant here"
> with a flat list of data relevant to the question.

My TM query interface wants to return all matching tags, including those 
found by ft-plugins. Can this be done?

Best regards