Re: Moving spellcheckers into the Gtk+ stack

["David Trowbridge" <trowbrds gmail com>]

As the author of SexySpellEntry/xchat-gnome, here are my (biased) suggestions:

1. Use a subclass of GtkEntry -- not only does this make porting
easier (since SexySpellEntry is implemented as such), but most of the
entry boxes inside UIs don't need spell-checking.  There are some
improvements I'd like to make if porting SexySpellEntry directly,
which I'm happy to talk about with interested parties.

2. Include a standard language picker widget.  Lots of applications
are going to want this, and it's going to become messy if people can't
just drop in something.  This has applications beyond spell-checking
too.  I personally feel that it's nicest to check words in the union
of selected languages, so that users don't have to micro-manage
settings for each UI element that they may potentially be typing in.

3. Merge the backend for the spell-entry and textview spellers.
GtkSpell3 (currently only in cvs) shares a lot of similarity with
SexySpellEntry, and it was always my intention to merge them together.
There's an opportunity to do some nice spell-context API for
extending spell checking facilities into custom widgets too.

-David