I apologize in advance for the off-topic nature of this posting. I've recently been lamenting the shortcomings of my current text editor for my purposes (SubEthaEdit since my copy of BBEdit is Classic and a new one costs way to much for my budget). I did a quick google search to try and find out what other options are out there, particularly in the F/OSS realm and with good support for XML/HTML/etc. And I couldn't find anything in particular. So, in my infinite (lack of) wisdom I've decided that it might be good to write my own.
Enter the problems. Since this is a large undertaking and it is something I'd like to see finished rather than remaining in my basement of weekend projects, I'm looking for guidance. I figure I'll prolly turn towards SourceForge as a place to host the project and open it up to the unpaid armies of programmers. But I'm wondering where all would be a good place to explicitly seek out such armies? For those who've played on the project management side of SF, is there anything I should know (other than what's in the documentation on their site, soon to be re-read)? Is there someplace other than SF which might meet my needs in this regard? I'm also wondering what text editors y'all use (aside from the obvious BBEdit) and, more importantly, what features about them do you like so much? I have a list of what I consider critical to the project, but I'm wondering what I've left out to making this a viable editor for the masses. One biggie for me is sophisticated syntax highlighting. The highlighting is definitely going to be extensible, but I'm wondering what languages y'all would consider essential coming out-of-the-box for the first release? So far I have: XML-family (xslt, xhtml, rss), CSS, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, LaTeX, C-family (C, C++, C#, Objective C), bash, and tcsh. Since I'm pretty new to GUI programming on Mac, is there a good place to look for critical analysis of the best approach? (e.g. Cocoa or no, NSTextView or no, strengths and limitations of different approaches/languages, things to look out for, etc.) I'll be developing on OSX 10.2.8, what sort of limitations/compatibility issues should I be aware of between 10.2 and 10.3? My current vague thoughts are that I'll want to write my own text pane object instead of using NSTextView and that this will be the lions share of the (conceptual) work. The other part being the program that calls the object (which may take the lions share of the time). I'm wondering how feasible it might be to use a perl-ish approach for parts of the object (w/r/t syntax highlighting, search-and-replace, etc) or if that would make it too slow/introduce too many dependencies. I have work later today and all my time until then will prolly be taken up with research for this project, but I'm thinking I'll do a writeup for the project sometime monday or tuesday and try to get things in motion within the next week or two. More information about the project's progress is liable to be found at my website: http://collab.freegeek.org/~wren/ . I appreciate any and all feedback on this (especially any interest in helping code/debug/mentor), though I'm thinking that (unless TPTB feel it'd be a helpful discussion to have on list) all correspondence should be directed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] off-list. Live Well, ~wren _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Declare Yourself - Register online to vote today! http://vote.yahoo.com
