[Geany] Discussion with Zhenech, list of suggestions for geany

[Lex Trotman]

On 3 May 2012 02:27, Andrei Kopats <hlamer at tut.by> wrote:
> Hi, Zhenech
>
> You said in IRC, that Geany is the best and I should terminate my project.
> I can't stand and will troll you back ...   ;)

Since I stirred Zhenech on IRC about Debian the other day I will leap
to his (and Geanys) defense against your horrible misunderstandings of
the "right" way to do it :)

>
> I found few problems while have been using Geany:
>
> 1. I tried to hide tabs and use list of files. But, when I switch files with
> Ctrl+Up/Down, focus in the list is moved not Up/Down but in some random
> order.It is terrible. I hate tabs, but, without it I can't switch files(((

Ctrl/Pg Up down moves in the order of opening the documents, the same
as firefox, emacs and other applications.

The documents pane is sorted in alphabetical order so users who have a
*lot* of files open can find things.

Dislike of tabs is your personal preference and irrelevant :)

> 2. After file has been changed on disk, Geany does not show it with icon. I
> don't know, that file has been changed, until activated it.

No, Geany doesn't waste cpu checking all files so it can spam you with
things happening in the background, only the file you are currently
interested in is checked.  There is a build time option for using GIO
file monitoring, but that has its own issues so it isn't the default.

There is a suggestion to check in background and change the colour of
the tab (but that won't help you of course :)

> 3. When I activate file, changed on disk, Geany interrupts me with modal
> dialogue, even if now I just want to move to next file after changed one.

Yup, how do we know what you want to do?  There is already code for
non-modal indication, but as we continue to support older GTK versions
without that facility it isn't merged yet.

> 4. How do I make case sensitive incremental search? Reg exp incremental
> search?

Don't get the question, case sensitive is an option on the search
dialog, to do incremental, either select to not close the dialog and
keep using next/prev etc or close the dialog and use
ctrl-g/ctrl-shift-g.

> 5. Main menu are the most easy way for new user to discover features and
> shortcuts, but F4, F2, ... shortcuts are not discoverable in the main menu

True because focus is by meese click not menu operation, but they are
discoverable from help->keyboard shortcuts

> 6. When searching in directory, mksv3 shows tree with matches, highlighted
> with yellow. It is much more readable, than dumped grep output in Geany

Who cares about the files that didn't match, waste of space.  And its
not just a raw printout, if you click on a line from the output you go
to that line in the editor, opening the file if needed.  It is find
*in* files, not "find files", much more useful.

> 7. Jump to console and open files with "geany /file/path" command is cool.
> It what I was missing in all GUI editors I've used before. But, mksv3
> Locator with Tab completion is even better, because it effectively uses
> modern GUI to show more useful information

Don't know what you mean here, normal open dialog gives completion
list dropdown, just select from list?

> 8. When cursor is just before highlighted bracket, and I type symbol,
> highlighting disappears and appears again. This flickering is verry
> annoying. QScintilla doesn't have such problem.

The bracket highlight flash is a deliberate feature to make the
matching bracket more visible, happens after any keystroke where the
cursor is on/next to a bracket.

> 9. MkS also was having a toolbar with buttons. Than I understood, that it
> just wastes space on the screen, All experienced users use shortcuts. It
> seems, I can remove all buttons from the toolbar and append incremental
> search lineedit to menu line. But, software should be configured as well as
> possible out of the box

"Best" possible configuration depends on your target audience, and
experienced people should know how to configure,
inexperienced/infrequent users may not, so software should be
configured for them.


> 10. MkS also was using Fx buttons for move focus to additional widgets, than
> I understood, that Alt+{first letter of widget name} is easier for
> remembering and quicker for pressing

No problem, just configure it that way :)

> I type "#include <bla" in the top of file, white Symbols tree is replaced
> with "Not tags found" message on dark background. When I swith to empty
> file, also "No tags found". This white/black background flickering makes me
> crazy

Yeah, probably a point, although the extent of the flicker depends on
your theme, I don't know that anyone else has complained or been
annoyed enough to fix it.

> 11. Geany uses main menu to switch current file indentation mode. IMHO it is
> better to use status bar button, which is both indicator and switcher. I
> spend about 1 min to find item in the main menu and now don't remember,
> where it is located.

Practice, I can't find anything in your IDE either :)

Status bar buttons? who ever looks at the status bar, it can even be
hidden,  toolbars are for buttons. (This might be a difference between
GTK and QT practice?)

>
> Probably, I listed some problems here, because I don't know something. I
> haven't read the manual, and have little experience with Geany. But, even if
> it is so, anyway it is Geany problem, because software must be intuitive and
> simple. People don't like reading docs.

:) to be "intuitive" it has to work the same as the last piece of
software the user used did.  That doesn't leave much room for
innovation nor account for variations in the user community.  Geany
generally focusses on a GUI tool and less experienced/intermittent
users, you focus seems to be on expert users, who should of course be
using Emacs :)

>
> All problems, I listed here, are quite easy to fix.
> Some of it are controversial. What is habitual for me might be not habitual
> for other people.

We would be especially careful about catching habits from monkeys hehe :)

> Probably, Geany developers will fix some problems after reading this email.
> I would join the project and fix it themselves, if it hadn't 1 really
> critical problem:
>
>     Coding in C is very slow. Scintilla and Geany can't make progress
> quickly
>

Well, you can write plugins in C++ if you wish, and Python is in
development, or Vala.

> I like Geany. It is probably the best editor I've ever used. Now it is
> better than mksv3, because it has much more features.
> But, all features, which are implemented in mksv3, are implemented better,
> than in Geany. And, mksv3 makes progress quicker.

As said above "better" is personal preference, not an absolute.

New software making progress quickly is the norm, until you start to
hit the hard parts.

>
> geany is the best - TRUE
> I should terminate mksv3 - FALSE

Terrible name though :)  (seriously you might find that a problem in
the long term)

I recently did a survey of ($free) Linux IDEs from the wikipedia page
(to see how well they handled one particular issue) but you weren't
there so I don't know how Simian Studio compares, in general the big
two, Eclipsed and Hasbeens of course had the most features, but
incongruously were the least flexible (unless you dug waaaay into
their insides).  Several wanted to include up to a Gb of dependencies,
fine if you've got them, bad if not, so they were skipped.  Dear old
Emacs compared ok, but of course its more hard core and not very GUI
(see http://xkcd.com/378/), not so good for a more intermittent user
like me.

In the end it mostly came down to what you prefer, and thats as
individual as programmers are (and believe me they are *sure*
individual :)

Cheers
Lex

>
> Andrei
>
>
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