Gedit class browser for Vala

 Here at Yorba most of us do our development work in Vala using Gedit.  Out of the box, Gedit doesn’t seem like much of an IDE.  But with a few plugins it starts to approach the feature set of a modern development environment.

One feature that’s lacking, though, is a good class browser.  With larger projects this is a must-have tool — scrolling through hundreds of lines of code to find a method seems silly when you can just point and click.

There already is a class browser plugin for Gedit. Caveat: it’s based on ctags.  While ctags is a great library, one language it doesn’t support is Vala.

So is all hope lost? No!  Here’s how to make the aforementioned class browser plugin support Vala.

  1. Install Anjuta. (You’ll see why in a second.)
  2. Install the plugin as described in its readme. Make sure you install the GSettings schema as described.
  3. Open Gedit and enable the plugin. It’s listed as “Source Code Browser.”
  4. In the same window, hit Preferences to open the plugin options.
  5. Next to “ctags executable” change the executable name from “ctags” to “anjuta-tags”.  Anjuta-Tags is a fork of ctags that adds Vala support, GIR support, etc.

Enable your Gedit sidebar (if it isn’t already) to see the class browser tab.  Open a Vala file and you’ll get a nicely formated hierarchical symbol list.

That’s all there is to it. Happy coding!

Shotwell 0.12.3 Released!

Good morning, one and all,

It’s with joy and with pride, both in no small degree,
That I get to announce oh-twelve dot three.

Bugs have been squashed and fixes were made,
Therefore, we suggest all users upgrade.

You’ll like this if your camera’s AVCHD,
And tags are safe now in your library,

And with dark images, if ‘enhance’ you smash,
Or zoom using hotkeys, it’ll no longer crash.

We hope this release brings you much joy and cheer;
Please give it a go, get your copy here:

Geary 0.1 released

After a year of hard work, we’re thrilled to announce the release of Geary 0.1, a lightweight email reader for the GNOME desktop.

Geary 0.1 includes the following features:

  • Basic support for viewing and composing HTML email
  • Send and receive email
  • Reply to all and forward email
  • Optional spell checker
  • Keyboard shortcuts
  • Organizes emails into conversations

Geary supports Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. If you’d like to download Geary, you may download the tarball. Build instructions are available on our wiki. For Ubuntu users, Geary will be available on the Yorba PPA shortly.

If you’d like to stay up to date with the latest in Geary, join Geary’s mailing list.

Major props to the Geary team for all their hard work getting this release out the door. Give Geary a try. We’re still in the early days of Geary’s development, and there are lots more features to add, but we’d love your input, opinions and help slaying bugs!