[MonoDevelop] Scintilla over GtkSourceView

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

I wanted to give some background on GtkTextView, the foundation widget
for all of the higher-level widgets that are used for source code
editing (GtkSourceView).

This editor is actually a model-view-controller port to Gtk (and Pango)
of the Tk text editor written by John Ousterhout.  An editor designed
for scalability, but which also features attributed text and embedding
of arbitrary widgetry.

The editor uses a b-tree model for efficiently storing the data, which
allows for quick scrolling for large sets of data and is quite powerful
rendering wise, and quite powerful to hook up extra rendering
capabilities later on.

The text editor was one of the most efficient engines back in the days
of X running on 32 megs of ram in a multi-user system, so it is a
finely tuned piece of software, one which was improved over many years,
and one which was authored by one of Computer Science's most clean and
brilliant minds.

In this new incarnation, I am sure the GtkTextView hackers have tried
to preserve as much as possible of this heritage.

The bottom line is that I think GtkTextView is a solid foundation.

Miguel.