A new gedit is coming

[Paolo Maggi <paolo maggi polito it>]

About 10 months ago we created an experimental development branch of
gedit called "new_mdi".

Development on the branch has had its ups and downs given to 'real life'
constraints, but we now feel that it is time to expose it to a larger
test-base in the hope that it will prove itself good enough for the 2.14
release.

The "new_mdi" branch has been used for a substantial rework of the gedit
internals with the goal of fixing various longstanding issues and
improving the quality of the whole codebase.

The main issues we wanted to fix were the ones related to the way gedit
handled its tabbed interface (see bug #131953), but then a lot of other
improvements have been put in.

In particular:

- GtkUIManager is now used for menus and toolbar instead of libbonoboui
- A side panel and a bottom panel have been added (plugin authors will
  be happy)
- A new gobject-based plugin system has been implemented
- Plugins can now be written in Python (look at the pyconsole plugin 
  and at the sample plugins at 
  http://gnome.org/~pborelli/gedit-plugins/)
- Reading and writing of files are now handled in an asynchronous way 
  (so the user interface never blocks)
- Local files are read using mmap (when possible)
- Incremental search is supported (use Ctrl+K)
- A lot of usability improvements with some new UI experiment are 
  featured
- Startup time and performaces have been improved
- Remote file saving is supported (for a limited configurable set of 
  VFS methods) (see bug #110191 and #130389)

You can get more info on "new_mdi" at
http://live.gnome.org/Gedit_2fNewMdi.

We are confident the new code base is quite stable, but most probably
there will be some problems and crashes here and there, so we need your
help to discover and fix them.

There are also a couple of known regressions (in particular document
auto-saving and the Execute Command plugin are missing), but we will fix
them before 2.14.

If you find some usability problems, please report them to us.

We will try our best to release the new code base in time for the 2.14
release, but your help will be very important to make our effort becomes
reality, so please: 

- Test it (we expecially need help for testing a11y and MultiHead 
  support)
- Report bugs
- Write documentation and HOWTOs
- Participate to our "Code for food" bounty (more info on 
  http://live.gnome.org/Gedit_2fNewMdi#LoveTasks)

So, if you really want to see the new codebase released for gedit 2.14,
please help us!

Ciao,
Paolo

P.S. The upcoming gedit 2.13.0 will be based on the new codebase.