Month: July 2021

Now that Text Editor has spell checking integrated I needed a way to print without displaying tags such our “misspelled word” underline squiggles. So GtkSourceView 5.2 will include gtk_source_print_compositor_ignore_tag() to do the obvious thing.

Previously, If you wanted to do this, you had to remove all your tags and then print, only to restore them afterwards. This should be a lot more convenient for people writing various GtkSourceView-based text editors. Although, I’m suspect many of them weren’t even doing this correctly to begin with, hence this PSA.

Last year I did some work to make GtkSourceView use PCRE2 for syntax highlighting. The primary motivation there was to improve syntax highlighting performance by using PCRE2’s JIT capability.

However, that left us in an odd place with how GtkSourceSearchContext works for regex-enabled search. It was using GRegex which itself uses PCRE (1). It’s pretty clear that the goal is to completely deprecate GRegex in GLib and it’s days are numbered. In particular, there is a lot we can’t do to control the execution environment and protect against things like stack overflows. Worsening things, PCRE doesn’t appear to be maintained these days.

So I finally got around to moving GtkSourceSearchContext to using our very-GRegex-looking PCRE2 wrapper ImplRegex after fixing a number of bugs in it. However, it does not use the JIT because that seems a bit unnecessary for something meant to be interactive. We want latency from Regex creation to execution to be quite low.

It will be available in nightlies soon for the 5.x series. I’m hesitant to backport it to 4.x or 3.x because it’s a rather large subsystem change and I’d like to reduce chances of breaking things I can’t reasonably test. Given the relatively few GtkSourceView 5.x applications in the wild (other than my own) I feel it’s a more acceptable change there.