[Geany] Couple of suggestions

[Rob van der Linde]

Hi, I'm now a fairly long time user of Geany. I have been using the SVN
for some time, and update it regularly.

I've built up a couple of suggestions over time, and thought I'd mail
them on this group.

1. Project Manager

One of the recent features I have noticed is the new project manager.
It's nice, but I think there is something missing, I will try to
elaborate...

Now prior to using Geany, I was a Windows user and used an editor called
Crimson Editor. Crimson Editor also had a project manager, but it had
something more. If you started or opened a project, you had a "Project"
tab on the left (at the moment Geany only has a Symbols and Open Files
tab here). Under the project tab, you could add files that belong to
your project, or add groups (folders). Double clicking on one of these
items, would open that file. This was very handy when managing large
projects with quite a few files.

The project files themselves were just saved as XML. Another handy
feature (which as I recall was turned on by default), is that it would
open the last project every time you opened Crimson Editor, including
any open files, it would associate the open files with the project too,
so also save this information inside the project file. Opening a project
meant it would open any files you had open last time you where working
with this project.

IF you want to see this behaviour, I suggest downloading Crimson Editor
(windows only), and having a play with the project manager.

At the moment, the only purpose I see with projects in Geany, is the
ability to have a custom run command, a description and set a base path,
but it doesn't appear to do much more than that (at first glance
anyway). It would be really nice, to possibly see a project manager,
similar to Crimson Editor in the future.

This would have to be my number one feature I would love to see in
Geany.

2. Inner Classes

The next thing is to do with Inner Classes and the Symbols tab on the
left dock. I use the Geany a lot with the  Django web framework
recently, it's really handy because of the integrated terminal! Anyway,
Django (being Python based) uses inner classes a bit (a class within a
class). You usually end up having to repeat the "Admin" or "Meta" inner
class inside several other classes, because this is how Django works.
Here's an example:

class Model1(models.Model):
   field = models.CharField(maxlength=128)

   class Admin:
      pass

class Model2(models.Model):
   field2 = models.CharField(maxlength=128)

   class Admin:
      pass

The problem with this, is I get multiple "Admin" items in my Symbol tab
on the left in Geany. It's not a real problem or anything, but it could
maybe be improved. Maybe, having Admin show as a sub item of each base
class would be a bit better.

3. UI wishes

The other two things I was going to mention are merely cosmetic, since I
am quite a user interface freak/Tango fan :) But I don't actually see
these as important at all.

First one is, the icon on the close button on tabs doesn't seem very
nice. Compare this for example with GEdit, or pretty much any other GTK
application, they seem to use the icon from the current icon theme on
the close button. If I change between Tango and Human icon sets, this
changes with it. Geany only appears to be using a black cross at the
moment.

Second one, is the new icons added to the Symbols are nice and all, but
they don't blend in very well with the rest of my desktop. It would be
really nice to see them more Tango-ified.