[MonoDevelop] SourceEditor: ideas

John Luke john.luke@gmail.com
Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:39:07 -0500


Hey,
Ben Motmans wrote:

>First of all, attached to this email, you can find an openoffice
>document containing some ideas for a new (better) source editor.
>However, those are merely ideas, my only intention of this email, is
>starting a discussion to find out all requirements for a new source
>editor
>
>if you have any ideas, suggestions, extra information, screenshots,
>... wathever about this topic, please let me know
>
>i would like to collect a lot of information so i (and hopefully with
>the help of some other people) can create a real design document for
>this source editor (and eventually start coding :p)
>
>-- Ben
>  
>
I don't know about others, but I would have preferred a plain-text mail 
with image attachments if necessary for this sort of thing.
It makes it a lot easier to quote.

I am not sure that you understand that the current editor has the 
ability to support most of what you want added.  In fact, there is
an existing parser for C# that can be used for error underlining, 
refactoring, highlighting etc. Some of these are already implemented
but not quite ready to be enabled.  I think identifying more of what you 
view as the problem currently would help here.

Also, you may not be aware of the previous port of the SharpDevelop 
texteditor which did many of these things in only C# code and the
related discussion that happened when we moved from that one to the 
current gtksourceview-based one.

The main issue with the current approach, in my opinion, is limitations 
by having mixed c/C# code to do these things.  So I would recommend
a first approach is to either port gtksourceview to C# on top of 
Gtk.TextView or revive the old port of the SharpDevelop editor.  At the 
point
where either of those is done it would make sense to talk about moving 
on from there.