Category Archives: Thoughts

Re: Consider the maintainer

Posted on January 29, 2017 by swilmet

I’ve read this LWN article: Consider the maintainer. It was a great read, and I want to share my thoughts, from my experience on being a maintainer (or helping the maintenance) of several GNOME modules. GNOME has a lot of … Continue reading →

Posted in GtkSourceView, LaTeXila, Library development, Me Myself and I, Programming, Thoughts | 5 Comments

Smooth transition to new major versions of a set of libraries

Posted on December 10, 2016 by swilmet

With GTK+ 4 in development, it is a good time to reflect about some best-practices to handle API breaks in a library, and providing a smooth transition for the developers who will want to port their code. But this is … Continue reading →

Posted in GtkSourceView, Library development, Programming, Thoughts | 7 Comments

Thoughts on the Linux Mint X-Apps forks

Posted on June 18, 2016 by swilmet

You may be aware that Linux Mint has forked several GNOME applications, either directly from GNOME (Totem -> Xplayer, Evince -> Xreader, Eye of GNOME -> Xviewer), or indirectly via MATE (gedit -> pluma -> XEd). GNOME is like the … Continue reading →

Posted in gedit, gspell, GtkSourceView, Library development, Programming, Thoughts | 12 Comments

Doing things that scale

Posted on April 23, 2016 by swilmet

In the software world, and with internet, we can do a lot of things that scale. Answering a user question on IRC doesn’t scale, only one person and a few lurkers will benefit from it. Answering a user question on … Continue reading →

Posted in Library development, Programming, Thoughts | Comments Off on Doing things that scale

Task-oriented desktop and applications?

Posted on November 22, 2015 by swilmet

I wanted to add a comment to Allan’s blog post The next big thing, but too late! comments are already closed (side note, I think it’s a general problem on blogs.gnome.org or it’s a WordPress issue, or both). So, at … Continue reading →

Posted in Thoughts | 8 Comments

Thoughts on live previews in LaTeXila

Posted on January 10, 2015 by swilmet

Several years ago I talked about some principles for the user experience of LaTeXila, a GTK+ LaTeX editor for GNU/Linux. The conclusion: The idea of LaTeXila is to always deal directly with the LaTeX code, while simplifying as most as … Continue reading →

Posted in LaTeXila, Thoughts | 8 Comments

{specialized, general-purpose} × {text editors, IDEs}

Posted on February 11, 2014 by swilmet

Some thoughts about text editors, IDEs, specialized or general-purpose applications. Several languages Other tasks Plugins Specialized text editor No No ? General-purpose text editor Yes No Yes Specialized IDE No Yes ? General-purpose IDE Yes Yes Yes The above table … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Thoughts | 14 Comments

Developing graphical IDEs the UNIX way

Posted on July 3, 2013 by swilmet

Programming on a UNIX environment generally involves the use of command line tools: vim/emacs, git, grep, sed, screen/tmux, and so on. What is really nice about these tools is that they do only one thing, but do it well. Now, … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Thoughts | 22 Comments