Life & hacking

The great people from gedit/gtksourceview finally implemented a new completion engine for GtkSourceView which allows us to drop lot of ugly custom code in Anjuta. But it also has some cool features:

• Combine auto-completions from different sources (called “providers”)
• Add auto-completions in an asynchronous way
• Support to add extra information to the auto-completions

For now, Anjuta uses only the first two but it’s really planned to add API Help for symbols.

Despite having a more stable and tested code and a nicer UI that means that he will never be disturbed while typing because the editor is searching for auto-completions to appear. Instead all this now happens in background and it really feels fast. This also gives us a possibility to add macros/snippets directly into the auto-completion framework. Screenshot:

There are also some other interesting things coming soon:

• a better engine for C++ (auto-completion of class-members, etc.)
• GSoc JavaScript plugin which needs to be merged
• a new bison/flex based automake parser as project-manager backend (probably won’t be finished until 3.0)
• a completely rewritten git UI