Re: Moving spellcheckers into the Gtk+ stack

[Nathan Fredrickson <nathan silverorange com>]

On Wed, 2006-12-06 at 18:11 -0800, David Trowbridge wrote:
> As the author of SexySpellEntry/xchat-gnome, here are my (biased) suggestions:

As the last maintainer of gtkspell I support the original proposal as
well as your suggestions. It would be great to see inline spell-checking
across the desktop.

> 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.

GtkSpell3, which has never been released, has a number of improvements
over GtkSpell2:

- Uses Enchant as the back-end dictionary provider.
- Can query enchant for list of available languages.
- Can load multiple dictionaries simultaneously and check words across
the union of those dictionaries.  Per-dictionary suggestion menus appear
as sub-menus of the context menu.
- Uses glib for smarter default dictionary activation at startup
(g_get_language_names()) and for gettext initialization (gi18n-lib.h).

Things I had planned to do but never did:
- GObjectification 
- Refactoring to separate the backend from the textview spell checker to
allow sharing of the backend among multiple textview checkers and
possibly spell-entry.

Nathan