[MonoDevelop] Scintilla over GtkSourceView

[Ben Maurer]

Hello Mike,

GtkSourceView is a part of the GNOME platform. It is used by gedit (the
GNOME version of notepad). It is also being used by the next-generation
C/C++ IDE, Scaffold. The widget is based on the work in GtkTextView, the
GTK+ text widget. It is not going away.

There are a few reasons we want to get the GTK+ buffer wrapped. If you
have not read my blog already, please do, it is a great introduction to
this. However, let me give it in short here:

      * With GtkSourceView, the buffer *feels* like all other buffers on
        the desktop. The *standard* gtk+ text view widget alone consists
        of over 15k lines of carefully tuned code. This is just for
        non-syntaxhighlighting, standard editing. It takes care of
        subtle problems such as i18n, a10y, l10n, (did i get my numbers
        right ;-), drag and drop inside the buffer, font layout, and
        other things i cant think of. In addition, GtkSourceView is more
        thousands of lines that take care of subtle invalidation cases,
        printing and such. These are issues that we really dont want to
        deal with.
      * With GtkSourceView I can file bugs upstream. This allows us to
        focus on core issues.
      * GtkSourceView is much, much faster than the C# buffer will ever
        be. I have a pre-alpha version working right now, there is a
        world of difference. Your buffer is very well designed, I quite
        admire it; however, it really, really does not stand a chance
        against the time tested buffer that GTK+ has.

On windows, where there is not such great support for buffers, your path
is really great. However, on GTK+, we have platform support, and we
should use it.

This is like a swing vs. native GUI issue from my perspective.

-- Ben

On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 11:14, Mike Krueger wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I think that the text editor should be done in C# and the #Develop 
> source code editor does fine (you're
> using a translated version for MonoDevelop, right?).
> It's much easier to change a C# text editor than any C project. Maybe 
> someone will develop the C# text editor
> further as stand alone project... I think that C/C++ should 'die' as 
> mainstream application development language in
> the future and it doesn't help much for a C# project to add uneccessary 
> C/C++ dependencies.
> 
> Regards
> Mike
> 
> > I read the text buffer is going to be migrated to GtkSourceView for 
> > scalability and usability. I have been using Anjuta(based on 
> > scintilla) for a few months, it supports code folding and auto 
> > complete features. I would like to suggest using Scintilla over 
> > GtkSourceView, so we can gain the new functionality without writing to 
> > much code.
> >
> >  
> >
> > Links:
> >
> > http://www.scintilla.org/
> >
> >  
> >
> > http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/
> >
> >  
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Jesus
> >
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