On 13-10-10 05:03 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Am 11.10.2013 00:55, schrieb Matthew Brush:
On 13-10-10 03:03 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
Hello,
I just wanted to let you know that I'm working on a new splitwindow
implementation and I would like to have early input. But, also as a
warning, I'm progressing only slowly because I'm at the final phase of
my master thesis which currently needs more attention that Geany
hacking.
Anyway, we all know about the limitations of the splitwindow plugin.
They include (not a complete list):
- the other view can only have one document
You can actually change which document it shows by using the little
drop-down button at the top. Still, real notebooks would be nicer.
Yea, right. I worded it badly. I meant the other view can only hold one
document and you can swap that one only using non-standard methods.
Yeah, it's a kind of weird interface, although it works not bad considering.
- you cannot undo/redo: you need to select the tab in the main notebook
to do that
You can undo using the builtin Scintilla right-click context menu, but
still would be great to have full keybindings+edit menu functionality.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that. Still crap :)
It was somewhat recent-ish. At first we didn't have it because it didn't
integrate into gettext translation stuff, so we couldn't translate the
menu items, but IIRC it was later decided that it was such a needed
feature being able to copy/paste/undo/etc, that at least having a
minimal non-translated menu is better than nothing.
- state is not saved/restored across Geany restarts
- it's completely awkward because the other view shows a doc that's also
in the main view, editing in the other view will change the main view at
the same time.
I think this is intended and I find it useful personally. I don't
think it should be taken out, IMO.
- you cannot toggle between the views with a keybinding (e.g. ctrl+tab)
- weird focus behavior
- more...
...Basically all edit keybindings, the edit/context menu and also
auto-indentation and similar features implemented inside Geany.
My plan is to reimplement splitwindow using a different approach: by
having two real, independemt notebooks, one primary and one seconary.
Why limit it to two? Even if it ends up being the default/primary mode
of operation, IMO it'd be a shame to make another hard-coded
assumption.[1]
Well, first: I'm not going to be hardcode two notebooks (except where
necessary and trivial extend, e.g. for my current "toggle this between
This sounds good.
notebooks". 99% of the now hardcoded places will work fine, e.g. I'm
using gtk_widget_get_parent(sci) to get a doc's notebook and implement a
foreach_notebook() macro. So this should make it really trivial to
support even more than 2 notebooks.
gtk_widget_get_parent(sci) makes a big assumption; that the Scintilla
will be packed directly into a notebook. Plugins can easily break this
assumption by reparenting the Scintilla widget, and even my
document-messages branch moved each Scintilla into a VBox inside each
tab so it could pack a GtkInfo bar above it. I think we could get rid of
this assumption by designing the code better.
Please don't write another foreach_ macro. Lets make it so we can use
normal C code. If you need a macro like foreach_notebook() it's probably
because the code it's hiding is crappy underlying code, IMO.
But still, I personally don't have a need for more than 2 notebooks.
Plus I see it will be difficult to support, because you need to nest
GtkPaneds. Since you suggest arbitrary splits you can do this only
programmatically which sounds like a major headache to me (especially
w.r.t. saving/restoring state). For now I want to concentrate on lifting
the hardcoded single notebook without ending up in the same situation
for two ones and without worrying about the heavy case of arbitrary
notebook placing. Then we can continue from there on with more
sophisticated stuff.
However if you have already successfully implemented this in a toy
editor I welcome you to join the fun.
Just to be clear, regarding the split window feature in my toy editor, I
only coded the UI logic, not any of the storing config of what panes
were open or what documents they had in them and more complicated stuff
like this. But the UI was indeed quite neat. SublimeText also has a
similarly flexible split pane system.
New docs will be opened in the primary one by default, but can be moved
to the secondary one at will. This means that no document can be shown
in both at the same time which makes it a loss less awkward. It also
As mentioned above, this is actually a feature and IMO it should be
kept unless there is some serious technical reason that makes it
impossible. Scintilla can easily be showing the same document in two
views and it keeps them in sync (see SCI_SETDOCPOINTER and friends).
Do you edit on both views or just read on one part of the doc while
editing the other? If this works automagically via scintilla then fine
but I can imagine it has more implications/complications apart from
Scintilla. Thus for me this has low priority so I would like to get the
non-duplicate docs use case working first.
Well for the Scintilla part, it "just works", it's exactly what it was
designed for. I'm not sure about any of the other complications apart
from Scintilla. Either way, as long as we don't make any assumptions
that two views can't be displaying the same document, it's no big deal
for now.
lets us lift the other limitations:
- undo/redo will work
- state can be saved across restarts (config file format will probably
need some changes for this)
- toggling with keybindings between views can work
- you can arbitrarily assign docs to views using different methods
The nice things about splitwindow that should be probably be kept:
- chose between horizontal and vertical split
- automatic sizing of the views
Just to be clear, because Lex's message made it sound like it was
slightly magic; it's just the width/height available divided by two
right now IIRC (which is fine IMO). With your above item about saving
state, hopefully it would include the splitter positions, but I guess
it's not a big deal if not.
Automatic sizing also includes what to do if one or both of the
notebooks becomes empty, a previously empty one becomes non-empty or how
to deal with the user making non-50/50 splits. Although I'm not even
sure the current splitwindow handles all cases well?
When the last tab is closed, close the split. If it's easy to re-split,
it doesn't matter. Like user just opens the document, right clicks on
the tab and presses the "move to split->vertical" menu item or something
like this. As mentioned in the other message, it probably isn't so
important to care about splitter positions, as long as they default to
50/50, at least for now.
- anything else?
Even though I usually rant against hard-coding language specific stuff
into the core, I think it would be extremely useful to have an option
to open header/implementation file in the other view. For example if
I'm editing foo.c, it could look for foo.h (either being open or in
same directory), and open it in the other view. It could work the
other way around as well. I think it'd probably only be really useful
for C, C++ and Obj-C filetypes, although I don't know that many
languages, so aybe some others could benefit as well.
This is provided by two plugins already. I think those plugins should be
able to show the header on the other notebook once they are adapted for
multiple notebooks. I also think of other use cases, e.g. geanyvc
opening the file diff/log/blame of the current file in the other notebook.
You are correct, I agree.
Unfortunately Geany's core is pretty hardcoded as to assume one (and
only one) notebook for documents. This means that for this various
changes to Geany core are necessasry, some of which may be difficult to
do without breaking the plugin API/ABI. Some are gonna hate this but I'm
not currently planning do this as a plugin because the core needs a lot
of changes anyway for breaking the single notebook assumption. But I'm
very open for discussion which is why I'm writing this early.
I agree it should be a core feature and a lot of users (myself
included) consider it a critical feature. I think it could be done
without breaking too much in the plugin API except a few functions
like document_compare_by_tab_order() and document_get_notebook_page()
and stuff, but maybe I'm missing something.
One problem is that there are some document_* functions which only refer
to page numbers. These are ambiguous with two (or more) notebooks. So
plugins that call this might act up. For now I changed these functions
to use the notebook that's currently focused but I of course added
corresponding functions with an explicit notebook parameter too.
All of those functions in document_ module shouldn't care the least
about GTK+ or even notebooks, IMO. This is the type of stuff I want to
cleanup.
There are also many direct uses of main_widgets.notebook, changing these
might (or might not) affect plugins.
IMO, if you're going to break the plugin API anyway, I say make it good
and we'll fixup core and GP plugins and make a message on the mailing
list for other users to know what broke and how to fix it in their own
personal plugins.
I already have an experimental version up and running that doesn't even
require all that much changes[1] and it seems to work nicely. See
this[2] screenshot.
IMO, least amount of changes is not necessarily a virtue, and can even
lead to further gluing of the code together making future changes even
harder.
So, any opinions?
It sounds like you already are planning some of this, but it would be
nice to cleanup a lot of the assumptions/hardcoded stuff/weirdness
while making these fairly intrusive changes. For example:
- The relationship between documents and notebooks they're in, as you
discussed. As Lex mentioned, it would be nice to not make too much new
hard-coded assumptions about other documents only being allowed in
another notebook, but rather making it extensible to support multiple
windows in the future. Also as I mentioned, it would be nice to not
make any hard-coded assumptions about only having two split notebooks[1].
The notebook of a doc can be retrieved via
gtk_widget_get_parent(doc->editor->sci) without hardcoding. I'm using
this where possible.
You're still hardcoding, just a different assumption as mentioned above.
- The relationship between documents (models) and Scintilla (views),
they should be almost completely independent. There shouldn't need to
have document->editor->scintilla, the document needn't care what view
it's in, only the reverse. I have no idea where GeanyEditor fits into
this, I've never understood why it exists; it's not a view, it's not a
model, and it's not really a controller either, it's like part wrapper
over Scintilla, part extension of GeanyDocument or something like this
I guess?
Sorry, I think this item is out of scope for this work. FWIW, I don't
quite understand the deal about GeanyEditor either.
It's not out of scope, but it is way more work than I think you're
personally prepared to do. It's basically the reason no one fixed the
split window before or worked to moving it into core, because it was too
much work with the current way it's coded. If this kind of stuff gets
cleaned up first, the split window thing becomes trivial (as well as
multi-window, etc). I would've fixed up split window myself 10x by now
if I didn't morally have to cleanup all this code to do it correctly.
- The lifetimes of documents. I don't see any reason to recycle a
fairly small structure like GeanyDocument, especially since we
basically set it up and tear it down each time anyway. I doubt the
overhead of freeing an old GeanyDocument structure and allocating a
new one later is worth the contortions it causes in code and the
weirdness in the plugin API.
Seems completely unrelated to splitwindow.
It's more part of the overall problems with the way the code currently
is, but you're right, it's mostly unrelated and could be addressed
separately.
- This follows with above, document_get_current() should *never*
return NULL. It makes absolutely no sense to me to allow having Geany
open without a document open. It'd be like having Firefox open with no
tabs/webpages open. Either it should open a blank untitled document
when the last one closes (this option exists already IIRC) or Geany
itself should just close (probably too annoying :) These last two
would get rid of weirdness like doc->is_valid, DOC_VALID(),
"documents" macro wrapping documents_array, foreach_document() macro
to iterate documents, etc.
Also unrelated.
Also related to cleaning up the code properly first, but not directly
maybe with the scope of changes you're proposing.
- Encapsulating the GeanyDocument so that plugins can't mess with
read-only members. For example, it makes no sense to allow plugins to
change doc->read_only, or doc->file_name (one of them actually does
this). It would be nice to make the API consistent here, like we have
document_set_text_changed() to mark the document as ditry/clean, but
there's no getter like document_get_text_changed(), which is
inconsistent and it allows plugins to seriously break Geany if they
aren't careful. This one is of course fairly off-topic and could be
attacked separately afterwards, I just thought it was worth mentioning
since you talked about needing to break the plugin API, it might be
useful to improve it during the breakage.
Also unrelated. I agree that big API breakage should be as rare and
concentrated as possible (i.e. within a single release) but not as part
of a single change. Let's not blow this splitwindow work up with
unrelated changes. This would just make review impossible and cost more
time to get done.
The fact that it "blows up" into more work is exactly why we should bite
bullet instead of keep "just making it work with minimal changes", when
the code is factored well, making changes becomes easier. But I digress
somewhat (as usual).
I withdraw my request to help out with this because I don't think you're
interested in doing some of the bigger underlying changes I was
interested in doing before attempting to fixup split window, and I don't
want to drag you down. As long as you keep in mind the stuff mentioned,
and don't make any additional same type of assumptions that were made
and evolved previously, I think it won't be such a big deal to do the
stuff I was talking about underneath your changes as a separate
initiative later on.
I actually use the current crippled split view *extensively* so I
would also be really interested in helping out with this. If it was
useful we could make a branch on the main repository to work from and
get more visibility with it probably.
Fine with me. You can also make PRs on my github until this is set up
(but beware that I still amend and rebase) :)
I can still make a branch for this but as mentioned above I won't be
contributing much to it as it stands. I will be a good tester though
because I *really* want a fully functional split window :)
Cheers,
Matthew Brush
Thanks for your input.
Sorry to be such a downer, I just really hate seeing this vicious circle
of adding more and more code ontop of other code that needs to be
refactored, making everything all intertwined and hard to hack on.
Cheers,
Matthew Brush
_______________________________________________
Devel mailing list
Devel@lists.geany.org
https://lists.geany.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devel
