Life & hacking

With the first beta relaese 2.3.0 today, Anjuta moves one step forward towards the next stable release which will bring lots of cool and long awaited features. So here is the promised summary of the new and coming features:

Glade integration

For integrated glade we used to have a very ugly “Glade” menu which consisted of the items usually used in an “Edit” menu but just for glade. This was very confusing because “Edit->Undo” would not undo the last change you did in glade but the last you did in the editor.

In trunk, the glade designer is integrated like any other editor in Anjuta and all items can be accessed with the “Edit” menu which always works on the current focused document.

Before, someone asks, if you want more Visual Basic fealing, take a look at this bounty.

Coding support

Our autocompletion and calltip code has been vastly improved for both editors. It can now show several tips at the same time if appropriate and should work much more reliable. This is of course not yet the end of the road because we want to have this for more languages (Python comes in mind) and we want to detect some more use-cases, like members and object methods. This will depend on the new symbol-db plugin (see below).

Auto-indentation should also work much better now with both editors, is configurable and can also auto-detect the settings from a mode line.

Quick search bar

Incremental search has sucked a lot in anjuta for long. To improve this we borrowed the idea of a search bar from firefox and I personally think that this rocks. Of course there is still a full featured search dialog and we are also planning to improve that one.

New symbol database

This feature is not yet available in the release but you can preview it in svn. The idea is to save all the code symbols which are parsed by ctags in a sqlite database (accessed with libgda) to allow much better code navigation and completion. Massimo already did a great job there and I hope that this will be ready for 2.4.0

The screenshot shows a file from the gimmie project with the class hierarchy. As you probably know, gimmie is written in python so the other advantage is that this will work for many languages and it might also be possible in the future to use other data sources apart from ctags (you know what I mean, Sven?).

What else?

Apart from those cool features a lot of bug-fixing work happend, especially in the debugger. We have a lot of great new icons and some still need to be integrated into trunk. HIG-stuff was also partly fixed though there is still room for improvement.

Other crazy ideas

Of course we have more plans for 2.4.0. This includes better version control management with integration into the file-manager, supporting more languages. We also want to migrate to GtkSourceView 2.0 but that will mean that someone (or myself) has to find time to add a new markers interface to GtkSourceView. And for all those Vala enthusiasts out there of p.g.o, yes we also plan to support Vala but it will at least depend on GtkSourceView 2.0 and either vala support for ctags or some other (reliable) way to get the symbol out of a vala file.

I am also glad to see more people willing to help out and ask for help with writing plugins!