London & gedit news
May 24th, 2009 — pborI just got back from a short trip to London, where beside work I also managed to sneak in some sightseeing and enjoy a dinner with Emmanuele and his wife.
In the mean time Jesse – who despite having opened a blogs.gnome.org account, is still slacking when it comes to actually blogging – has been rocking as usual. In the last days he decided to give some much needed attention to the External Tools plugin. As a result all bugs in bugzilla about that plugin are now resolved and new features have been implemented. In particular the plugin now supports language specific tools, which also means that we can ship a larger selection of default tools since they will not clutter your menu as the will appear only when editing a specific kind of files: if you have any good scripts for your favourite language that you think should be included upstream feel free to send them our way.
Beside the work on external tools, we also started to make some other changes that will be part of the next release. We decided to remove the ancient “Open Location” dialog that allowed you to enter an URI: these days you can enter an URI just fine from the standard file chooser and the common opinion among gedit developers was that nobody ever used that dialog. We instead included a Quick Open plugin that allows to quickly open files (or even switch tabs) with very few keypresses: while you type it looks into different “providers” (currently open files, recent files, current directory, etc) to suggest you the file you are looking for. Since a video is worth thousands words, see for yourself: