It started as an application for me to verify the correctness of the GtkSourceView 5 API (which targets GTK 4). After that it helped me implement JIT support for GtkSourceView languages. Once that was done it became my test case while I wrote the GTK 4 macOS backend and revamped the GL renderer.
It is a simple and humble text editor. It does not have all the corner cases you’d expect from a text editor yet. It does not have aspirations to be a programmers text editor.
Now that you know this is very much a technology preview release only, you might be tempted to keep your important data away from it.
What it can do
- Simple interface designed by the GNOME design team. You can find the mockups in the traditional places
- Search and Replace
- Typical GtkSourceView features
- Quick access to recent documents
- Multiple windows
- Automatic discovery of .editorconfig and modelines settings
- Light and dark mode
- Automatically save files to drafts, restored in case of crash
- Printing
- Can be run from within a Flatpak sandbox and uses document portal for access to host files
What it cannot do
- It doesn’t protect you from trying to open really large files
- Support your custom GTK 4 theme
- Auto-completion or snippets
- Plugins
- Custom file encodings
- Spell check
- Change style schemes beyond light and dark
- Translations or Help of any kind
Building
If you’d like to test it out, one way is to clone the repository from GNOME Builder and click Run. Additionally, you can find a Flatpak in the gnome-nightly Flatpak repository.
