ricardo lafuente
2009-06-27 14:03:01 UTC
Hi all, here's a thought i had today.
I looked around and found there are stable versions of Gedit for Windows
and OSX (and GNU/Linux, of course).
I tried the OSX version and found it worked rather nicely. Not sure
about the Windows version (Stuart, is it good?)
Gedit's plugin architecture, which is Python-based, allows one to fiddle
with all the elements of the application -- add/remove icons from the
toolbar, set options, run commands, etc. The Shoebot plugin i made a few
weeks ago was pretty easy to code after following the HOWTO documents.
So i was thinking -- is it worth considering the option of using Gedit
as the base for a Shoebot IDE, similar to Processing's sketchbook?
While the IDE that we have now is decent, it is and will be a pain to
maintain... its code is huge! And somehow, it feels like we've made a
lite version of Gedit :) Something that we could as well achieve using a
plugin that could remove undesired interface elements and add new ones.
The only necessary steps for a user would be to
- install Shoebot
- install Gedit
- install the Shoebot plugin for Gedit.
We could have 2 modes for the plugin -- one that extends the
functionality of Gedit, such as the one we have now, and another that
turns Gedit into a minimal sketchbook-like app -- removing other syntax
highlighters and some other irrelevant options in the menus, making it a
Shoebot-oriented editor. Again, i'm thinking about the Processing IDE as
reference: it's a pretty good education tool, since it doesn't have all
of the crud present in a 'regular' text editor. We've done this with our
IDE, but i'm not sure how easy it will be to keep improving on it.
A feature that would be easy to code for Gedit would be to have it
highlight the offending line when there's an error on the script. I'm
sure there's other things that we could come up with :)
Tristan: would you find having this kind of sketchbook-like application
useful for your purposes?
All: does this sound like a stupid idea?
ricardo
I looked around and found there are stable versions of Gedit for Windows
and OSX (and GNU/Linux, of course).
I tried the OSX version and found it worked rather nicely. Not sure
about the Windows version (Stuart, is it good?)
Gedit's plugin architecture, which is Python-based, allows one to fiddle
with all the elements of the application -- add/remove icons from the
toolbar, set options, run commands, etc. The Shoebot plugin i made a few
weeks ago was pretty easy to code after following the HOWTO documents.
So i was thinking -- is it worth considering the option of using Gedit
as the base for a Shoebot IDE, similar to Processing's sketchbook?
While the IDE that we have now is decent, it is and will be a pain to
maintain... its code is huge! And somehow, it feels like we've made a
lite version of Gedit :) Something that we could as well achieve using a
plugin that could remove undesired interface elements and add new ones.
The only necessary steps for a user would be to
- install Shoebot
- install Gedit
- install the Shoebot plugin for Gedit.
We could have 2 modes for the plugin -- one that extends the
functionality of Gedit, such as the one we have now, and another that
turns Gedit into a minimal sketchbook-like app -- removing other syntax
highlighters and some other irrelevant options in the menus, making it a
Shoebot-oriented editor. Again, i'm thinking about the Processing IDE as
reference: it's a pretty good education tool, since it doesn't have all
of the crud present in a 'regular' text editor. We've done this with our
IDE, but i'm not sure how easy it will be to keep improving on it.
A feature that would be easy to code for Gedit would be to have it
highlight the offending line when there's an error on the script. I'm
sure there's other things that we could come up with :)
Tristan: would you find having this kind of sketchbook-like application
useful for your purposes?
All: does this sound like a stupid idea?
ricardo