[Geany] Per-workspace instance of Geany

[Lex Trotman]

2011/1/23 Randy Kramer <rhkramer at gmail.com>:
> Well, from the peanut gallery, to me there's an obvious
> preference--number 4--it should start a new instance in the current
> workspace.  For now it doesn't affect me, because until I get a lexer
> for askRhk, I'm only experimenting with Geany.  But, once I start using
> Geany as my default editor, I'd expect to have at least one instance in
> every workspace (desktop) that I'm using, and files that I open in the
> workspace should open in the instance of Geany in that workspace.
>
> Randy Kramer
>
> On Saturday 22 January 2011 05:11:39 pm Krzysztof Żelechowski wrote:
>> Dnia sobota, 22 stycznia 2011 o 22:49:47 Julien Nicoulaud napisał(a):
>> > Hi all,
>> > I'm using GNOME with several workspaces, and there's a behaviour I
>> > find quite annoying: if you have an instance of Geany running in a
>> > workspace and you open a file in another workspace, it just opens
>> > the file in the already running instance and switches you back to
>> > the workspace. I know this is more a usability issue at the desktop
>> > environment level than Geany in particular, since it is the same
>> > for other programs such as web browsers, but may be Geany could
>> > address it ?
>> >
>> > Anyway, I wrote a little wrapper script that detects if there's no
>> > Geany window in the current workspace, in which case it forces
>> > creating one:
>> > https://github.com/nicoulaj/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/geany It was
>> > only tested on GNOME but should work as well on other desktop
>> > environments.
>>
>> There are four ways to go here.
>>
>>   1. Leave things as it is because Geany is an IDE, so if a file
>> needs to be sent to Geany, it is probably good to show other
>> developer tools as well. 2. Move Geany to the active desktop.
>>   3. Share Geany with the active desktop.
>>   4. Start a separate Geany environment.
>>
>> I do not see any obvious preference to any of these options.
>>
>> Chris

Hi All,

There are two issues that I see which complicate potential solutions here.

1. There is not AFAIK any common portable way to find out which
workspace Geany is running in and that a request to show a file in
Geany came from a different workspace, so deciding to run another
instance or move Geany to another workspace is going to have to be
solved for each system Geany runs on.  This is probably why many
applications are not workspace aware.

2. Issues around running multiple instances of Geany have not yet been
finalised despite significant passionate debate on several past
threads.  This means that there are problems manually running multiple
instances, let alone automatically running them.  Some of the issues
are:

a. who owns the preferences? preventing multiple instances from
changing preferences is very limiting, if they can all change them,
who saves their set when Geany terminates? and how to lock them
irrespective of the filesystem they reside on to prevent scrambled
preferences?

b. how do you restart multiple instances? which leads to session
management being required, but Geany has two potential implementations
of that and no clear path forward yet

c. the same issues relating to preferences apply to project files
being used by more than one instance, or if a project can be open in
only one instance how to enforce that?

d. and of course these also apply to the same document file being open
in multiple instances, at logout/shutdown who's copy gets saved? how
do you detect the fact so you can at least warn the user? remember
that locking and the like don't work on remote filesystems.

3. It is (I think) a big change to allow Geany to have one instance
with multiple top level windows, how to handle different projects in
different top levels? how to handle different preferences in different
top levels?

So AFAICT there is no clear solution.

My personal choice would be 3 because it would then also support
multiple monitor setups, but I believe that there is a lot of usage
issues to resolve and a LOT of work involved.

Any good ideas welcome.

Cheers
Lex

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