Tag Archives: gedit

Recent GNOME work you might be interested in

Jim Nelson - CC BY-SA 3.0

Yorba recently received funding from Adam Dingle toward fixing a smorgasbord of bugs in the GNOME ecosphere — from gedit to Epiphany to Nautilus to GTK, and more.  The quantity of tickets (over fifty!) and the breadth of the applications they covered meant we needed to find someone with a particular affinity for the depths of GTK and GObject.  Fortunately, we found such a person in Garrett Regier, who’s been doing a smash-up job the past few weeks knocking down these particularly aggravating bugs.

To give a taste of some of the fine work Garrett’s been up to:

As you can see, most of these so far are annoyances, but long-standing annoyances that can make the user feel there’s something not quite right.  Some were down-right maddening.  Consider the over-enthusiastic file chooser bug.  As time went on, its reporter “trained” himself to work around it.

Garrett is still at work on Adam’s list and so more fixes should be dropping soon.  In addition, we’ve asked Garrett to start working on larger projects, including a Find in All Files gedit plugin that should be more stable and easier to use than the currently existing alternatives.  Stay tuned!

 

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!