This post will answer the questions generated by the previous one (or at least try to).
One of the main concern is “Why use yet another search UI ?”, evince/firefox/epiphany use more or less the same approach, a bottom bar that pops-in causing no reflow of text. Gedit uses a sidebar that cause text to be “pushed” to the right, maybe causing reflow is auto-wrap is activated and the window too small
Here is what Paolo “pbor” Borelli has to say about that:
Did gedit look at the mozilla/evince/epiphany style search popup at all?
Yes, we discussed it a lot, we also discussed it at guadec, and we also tried implementing a search bar before implementing the sidebar, the reasons why a search bar doesn’t work very well for us are:
- Fitting replace in the bar doesn’t work well
- Ditto for the varions search options (match case, etc)
- The search bar at the bottom doesn’t work well with the output window (bottom pane) open
- And at the top it doesn’t work well with tabs, which I think is the reason why firefox has it at the bottom. In general I’m not very fond of search bars at the bottom… is the last place where my eyes goes
- The last reason (even if not very important) is that for text,I value vertical space more than horizontal
However we are aware of some of the drawbacks of a side pane search, the most important being that the text is “shifted” to the right, so we decided to stop speculating and try this UI and stick with it until we get enough feedback (note that now search does also find-as-you-type), after having tried it for a while, it’s not that bad. The problem of reflow would also be fixed by having the pane on the right, but we felt that a sidepane on the right is weird.
Now some other points taken from the same IRC discussion:
“new_mdi” [the CVS branch] is almost a rewrite (apart from search, it gets rid of bonobo, has completely async file loading/saving with complete vfs support, new plugin system,etc), but we do not have enough time/manpower, so we are taking our time [This is frightening, quick they need developers, developers, developers !]
I think that our loading/saving code in new_mdi is shaping up really good, we are using xfer too for remote saving, the problem is that we also have to deal with backups which makes things really hard, especially when you have to deal with permissions and symlinks…
We also put special care in avoiding races (like testing perms before writing, which is inherently racy), local files are special cased and the saving algorithm is inspired by vim, also for loading we special cased local files and used mmap which is blazingly fast 🙂
And finally we got rid of the dialogs, dialogs suck in gedit because they block all the tabs… now you can start a slow operation in a tab and do stuff in another one:
Concerning other questions:
- What are the tabs at the bottom of the sidebar?
It has three tabs, the first one presents a list of opened documents, the second, the search UI.
The third is in fact added by a plugin, which can now add their tab to the sidebar, here it is the TagList plugin’s list (a list of xhtml tags for examples) - Is there a FileBrowser Plugin for gedit, or Project Manager ?
Yes there will be one, but the plugin interface has been completely rewritten, so it’s not usable yet. - Is it possible to reorder tabs manually now? (with drag-and-drop)
Yes ! - I don’t see this in CVS yet, or am I missing something ?
to see this new gedit, you have to specify the “new_mdi” CVS branch, be warned, it is experimental !
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co -r new_mdi gedit
