Re: [desktop-devel-list] Potential GNOME IDE

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2014 at 04:44:31PM +0100, Sébastien Granjoux wrote:
> I'm one of the developer of Anjuta, so this discussion looks a bit
> strange. I think Anjuta is already quite mature as a GNOME IDE. It
> supports smart indentation, debugger, git, code completion,
> automatic generation of GObject boilder plate code...
>
> Contrary to Netbeans or even Geany which uses only Gtk+ 2, it uses
> Gtk+ 3, GtkSourceView, Glade, Devhelp.

Having both gedit and Anjuta is already a duplication of effort.
Personally I prefer only a text editor, and use the command line or 
other applications for the other features (git, glade, devhelp, etc).

By moving some features from gedit or Anjuta to GtkSourceView, we can 
eliminate part of the effort duplication. And specialized text editors 
can emerge, which is a good thing in my opinion. I don't really like 
general-purpose applications, they are more complex to configure, and 
they are more complicated to learn and use. The UI is generic enough for 
all the possible plugins, but for some plugins the UI is a bit too 
restrictive. With a specialized application, the UI is exactly what is 
needed. There is thus a potentially better usability.

If there are libraries for creating easily a text editor, a debugger, 
Git features, and so on, in the end the IDE is just a GUI to integrate 
all the pieces together. Specialized text editors can be created for C, 
Vala, Python, LaTeX, etc. And general-purpose text editors and IDEs can 
still exist, but would require less maintenance work.

But I agree, in the current situation, creating a completely new IDE is 
just interesting for testing new designs easily, with lots of stubs for 
the features.

I hope it clarifies a bit my position,
Sébastien W.