[MonoDevelop] SourceEditor: ideas

Alexandre Gomes alexmipego@hotmail.com
Wed, 02 Mar 2005 14:01:51 +0000


Hi Ben,

The "master" that was planning a new, and managed, SourceEditor was
Todd. I don't see any post from him, so I think he has something to say,
anyway here is my opinion.

First of all, and as said before, most the thing you said are easly done
with the current SourceEditor. Yet, it can be difficult sometimes but in
general I think it has a good approach to the purpose it is designed to.

There are some major problems, the main one, is that the developers of
sourceeditor cut our legs by "disabling" to us some of features of
TextView. Thats the reason we need hacks :(

>From all you said I think we can do all with current sourceeditor
because they are not dependent on it. We only need to get the info and
display it. For example, coding the new SourceEditor to grab errors
would make it somehow to bind to MD. Thats not the objective here.

The two things that I consider harder to do, are CodeFolding, or general
ruler support, and support for mixed languages like html/C# for ASP.NET.
For this last, I suppose we need to extend SourceEditor to support
multiple Buffer levels and mix them to expose on screen. Its posssible
with current sourceeditor.

Now, the first I said, Rulers support, I'm on it, I've almost ready a
new rulers system that bind to sourceeditor... as you already know of.
When it is finished I'll post here for review and new suggestions, but I
can tell you that you'll have much more power, and I think you'll like
it.

As side note, the only "ruler" place the SourceEditor doesn't let you
control is the left one. So that thing of the combobox (that I have in
my plans too) is 100% doable right now. If you want to work at it, I can
help you. Btw, I gave you my CodeFoldingRuler code, so you can see that
the parser stuff is already working (at least for code folding) - I'm
not sure but for the methods list it can be useful too.

To finish just want to say that I'm not against a new SourceEditor, yet,
anything we do before it will be useful. For instance I think my rulers
system is very easy to adapt to a new SourceEditor, so we can reuse my
Rulers and start from there.

On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 18:13 +0100, 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
-- 
Alexandre Miguel Pedro Gomes,
Portugal