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:
May 24th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
That’s interesting. I wish every app could do something like that…
Still needs to be HIGfied, right?
May 24th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Rafael: I would not be surprised if margins are slightly not HIGgy… a patch would be more than welcome :-)
May 25th, 2009 at 8:34 am
Super stuff. Can’t wait to try it out. How do you keep it fast?
May 25th, 2009 at 8:44 am
Within one session, a directory/files are only statted once and kept in cache, we keeps it reasonably fast. Nevertheless, it does do synchronous IO, so there are some possible foreseen problems which might make it necessary to make it all asynchronous.
May 25th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
So now we’re back to making design decisions based on the “common opinion” of the developers, rather than actually asking the users?
Yay, it’s GNOME 1.x all over again.
May 25th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Effy: the “common opinion” of the developers is based on the feedback from our userbase. Including the fact that I am asking for feedback in this very blog post. That said “asking the users” about ui is pretty much a recipe for a bad ui since the ui will be based on a zillion different opinions instead of a uniform vision. What we need to collect from the user are their requirements and needs and once we have them is up to us to come up with what we think is the best ui to address them. So, to put it another way: why would you miss the old “open location”? What could it do that can’t be done with the file chooser? Or is it just flaming for the sake of flaming?
May 27th, 2009 at 12:54 am
That’s wonderful news!