[MonoDevelop] State of MonoDevelop on the Mac

[Nicholas Francis]

Hi Michael.

Your bug list sort-of matches what I've noticed.

I'm the lead UI guy from Unity - We are currently moving Unity from  
Mac-only to Mac and PC, so we've actually gone through the process of  
picking our brains about everything that was natural to Mac users.  
After we ship WindowsUnity (soon, I pray), I'd love to help out with  
doing some keybindings to make it feel nice for a Machead (after all,  
I did our text editing system, so I have our keymapping tables for  
text editing).

In general we're very open to figuring out how we make sure that  
MonoDevelop becomes a great app on Mac.

Cheers,
Nicholas

On 21/02/2009, at 10.21, Michael Hutchinson wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I've been fixing up the Mac MD in the last few days, trying to
> identify what needs to be resolved to polish it up.
>
> I've set up a minimal bit of dock and menu integration (click on dock
> to unminimise, fix the dock quit command, that sort of thing), fixed
> the pkgconfig lookup (so all the Mono packages, including GTK# show
> up), and tidied up the configure scripts. On the build side, I set up
> the makefiles so that I can easily generate a MonoDevelop.app.zip file
> on Linux, which can be downloaded and run directly. I also made sure
> it's easy to build and run MD from SVN from within MD on the Mac (open
> & hit "run").
>
> Encouraging progress, maybe, but there's still much to be done. The MD
> team isn't going to work on this for the upcoming 2.0 release, since
> we're focusing on Linux stability. The 2.0 release for OS X will still
> be a preview. After 2.0 we will be able to focus more on improving the
> usability and stability of MonoDevelop on the Mac and Windows.
>
> A lot of this, especially key binding stuff, cannot easily be done by
> those of us who are not Mac users, as we just don't know how typical
> Mac keybindings are expected to *feel*. Help and advice from Mac
> developers would be much appreciated. Even if you fix just one of
> these things, that means together we get more of it sorted out,
> faster. I'd be happy to advise anyone on how to get started.
>
> Here's my summary of the current state of things I'm aware of that
> need to be fixed.
>
> Redraw issues:
> * File chooser's file list
>  - GTK+ bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550939
> * Tree view's selection and expander arrow
>  - GTK+ bug
> * MD text editor's text
>  - This may be fixable in MD itself, or might be a GTK+ bug
>
> Key binding issues
> * Good default Mac keybinding scheme
> * Ability to bind Command
>  - It seems to show up as Alt right now
> * Reliable capture of keys for keybindings
>  - Can't capture F keys - OS is grabbing them?
>  - Widget mnemonics seem to override key capture - GTK+ issue?
> * Display keybindings using Mac-style symbols
>  - In key binding manager and menus
> * Key bindings for GTK+ built-in widgets
>  - GTK+ bug & patch: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=530351
> * Review all places that MD code uses key modifiers, e.g. completion
> window, expanding text selection, etc. and make sure they can be made
> Mac-like
>
> Global menu integration
> * IGE menu integration library is very limited, so currently disabled
>  - Can't display menu items with embedded labels, which we use for
> displaying our accelerators, since we don't use GTK accelerator
> infrastructure
>  - Doesn't display radio or check items
>  - Doesn't display icons
>  - Doesn't update sensitivity
>  - Reported to be very broken with menus that are dynamically updated
> * Proposed solution: Write a CarbonMenu# binding (P/Invoke, should be
> pretty easy) and use it to turn a CommandEntrySet into a Carbon menu
> directly
>
> Misc
> * Right-click emulation with Control-click
>  - GTK+ bug & patch: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346609
> * Modal dialogs don't stay on top
> * Text position shifts while it's selected, even with Monospaced  
> fonts.
>  - Mostly a MD kerning bug, but monospace issues may be
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=569146
> * Dock integration
>  - Some basics done, but would be useful to be able to add commands  
> to the menu
> * File handlers integration
>  - Ffetch list of handlers for given mime types, for "open with"  
> context menu
> * Recent files list integration
>  - Currently use the FreeDesktop ~/.recently-used file, which still
> works for MD
>
> Drag-n-drop
> * Buggy, with a lot of unimplemented features needed by the GTK#  
> designer
> * http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559904
> * http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501588
> * Shift-drag: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=569145
>
> Misc. disabled addins
> * Gettext addin - not sure why
> * SVN addin - needs testing, svn binding reportedly very unstable on  
> Mac
> * GtkCore designer - missing drag-n-drop in GTK+, no dllmaps,  
> probably more
> * Database addin - should work now it no longer uses GtkSourceView,  
> but untested
> * Boo binding - boo console uses GtkSourceView. Port or disable this  
> feature.
> * Moonlight/Silverlight - developer libraries not present (also a
> problem on Linux)
> * Python, Vala, Java - totally untested
>
> Open GTK+ Quartz bugs can be seen here:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?query=component:quartz+product:gtk%2B+
>
> It would be useful to isolate the GTK/GDK issues and file bugs against
> GTK. We can fairly easily apply patches to the GTK+ that Mono ships,
> making things better for all GTK# apps.
>
> -- 
> Michael Hutchinson
> http://mjhutchinson.com
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