11 Jan 2005

gedit

I really wanted to see gnome-vfs support finally make it into gedit, so with the help of paolo I picked up some of his code and beat it into shape. This also required looking at some of the gnome-vfs internals and get a couple of patches accepted there (thanks teuf!).

If anyone thinks (like I did) that saving a darn text file is trivial, he should probably take a look at the code: it isn’t rocket science, but dealing with all the small details (create a backup, fail gracefully, symlinks, persmissions, etc) requires definately more than open(), write(), close().

Modulo some FIXMEs the code now works fine, however at the end we decided to not include it in 2.10: we were not comfortable enough with the reliability of some of the vfs methods and we didn’t investigate yet how to work out some UI and code details to integrate it in gedit. It’s much better to wait for 2.11 instead of changing such a central part of the codebase just before the feature freeze: this way it will get tested for a whole developement cycle.

Since we didn’t want to hit the feature freeze empty handed, during the night I hacked up a plugin which lets you save a copy of the file to any remote locations through gnome-vfs (saving a copy is less tricky than real save since you don’t have to care about backups). paolo instead hacked up current line highlighting in gtksourceview and added support for that and for bracket matching to gedit. Not bad if you consider we didn’t have any new feature till two days ago!