Life & hacking

Today, anjuta 2.25.4 was released as first beta of the upcoming anjuta 2.26. Actually I am sorry that we didn’t release any other 2.25.x but time is limited and we didn’t want to release something completly broken. Anyway, this release features various cool new things. For details see the NEWS entry but I will present the most important things here.

HIG-Improvements

The toolbar has been simplified and cleaned of the bonobo stuff and the short-cuts of the menu items should now all match the HIG where this doesn’t conflict with specific IDE requirements. In addition some seldom used (and broken) menu items have been removed.

Symbol-db plugin

Finally, after it has been in alpha and beta stages in the last two releases, the symbol-db plugin is mostly finished and replaces the old symbol-browser in this release. This means anjuta uses the system installed ctags executable now instead of an (outdated) copy of the ctags sources. In addition every symbol is now kept in a sqlite database that is accessed using libgda. It works for all languages supported by ctags and allows us to have more symbol information and a faster lookup.

The symbol-db plugin also scans the packages required by the project automatically (using pkg-config). In addition, it also checks if the symbols are up-to-date, so it will rescan when you update gtk+ for example.

In the future we hope that it will help us to get a better auto-completion though this also depends on good language parsers.

Devhelp with webkit

The devhelp plugin has been updated to use webkit instead of gtkmozembed which makes it at least much easier to embed. The plugin provides all the features of devhelp trunk now. In addition, there is a link to library.gnome.org now to make it possible to view the online reference manuals inside anjuta.

Starter

When starting up anjuta, a new start page is now displayed which gives quick access to common operations and provides links to the developer documentation. The thought behind this is to make it easier for newbies to get familiar with anjuta and the GNOME development model.

Bookmarks

The bookmark interface has been completely rewritten to match the metaphor of bookmarks as it is used in web browsers. It is possible to assign names to bookmarks now and anjuta will automaticly propose names (such as the current symbol scope, the current selection or “file.c:35”). Bookmarks are remember accross sessions and saved with the project.

Internal improvements

The gnome-build module has been merged into anjuta as it had no other users and featured its own homebrew plugin system. It has been ported to use the anjuta plugin system and integrated with the project-manager.

Lots of work has been done to remove the use of gnome-vfs and libgnome(ui). It is not completely finished yet but should be done until 2.28.

Some new macros have been added to support log domains for debug messages to help finding the interesting messages

The scintilla editor has been updated to 1.77 to match with the upstream sources. It would be much easier if the scintilla team would release a library that we could link against but for now we have to ship their whole source tree.

In addition lots of bugs have been fixed especially in the HIG, usuability and search area. The full (long) list is in the NEWS file.

Special thanks:

(in no particular order)

• Sébastien Granjoux (for general bug fixing, merging gnome-build and being totally awesome)
• Massimo Cora’ (for doing the great work on the symbol-db plugin)
• Naba Kumar (for giving lots of input on design decisions)
• James Liggett (for the work on the version control plugins)
• Adam Dingle (for many patches and lots of QA in bugzilla)
• Jens Georg (for the GNOME-VFS porting)
• Carl-Anton Ingmarsson (for various great patches)
• Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (for updating devhelp to webkit and the new starter plugin)
• All translators and people I possibly missed here