Re: [gedit-list] The plugin mentality

[Ernesto Posse <eposse cs queensu ca>]

I disagree with the statement that "By supporting plugins, gedit
leaves basic features out of its editor." The very notion of a plugin
architecture is to have a small core with only very basic features
which can be customized an extended. Any system with such an
architecture typically includes a small set of basic plugins, and
gedit is no exception. The question is rather whether the set of
default plugins that comes with gedit is the "right one". This is of
course, an editorial decision, and not an easy one, because everyone
has different needs. Therefore, if gedit does not come prepackaged
with a particular set of plugins which you might consider useful, it
is due to an editorial decision, and not due to "supporting plugins".

By the way, I think at least one of the sample features mentioned,
syntax highlighting, is part of the core, and gedit ships with
highlighting for a host of very common languages. And comparing gedit
to Notepad is a bit harsh, don't you think?

I do get the point that a plugin architecture may encourage a kind of
"deferring" mentality. But I think the alternative would be a bad
idea: an editor which comes with a boat load of features built-in;
everyone can use some small subset of those features, but no one can
use all of them. A bloated design, the result of a "more is better"
mentality is not a good thing and has produced many terrible pieces of
software.

Having said that, I think gedit is missing (as a built-in feature) an
easier approach to plugin search, selection and installation. OK,
extracting an archive in the plugins subdirectory is not too
difficult, but there should be a menu/dialog option for this, which
can obtain the plugins directly from an online repository. There is
also a plugin that supports backing up your gedit configuration so you
can reproduce it in any machine you log into. I think support for this
should also be built-in. As for which other plugins should be
prepackaged, I'm sure there's room for discussing that among the gedit
developers. I do wish myself they included a few I like, but I hope
they keep simplicity as the guiding principle.




On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Sebastian Posch
<posch sebastian gmail com> wrote:
> I was thinking about the same issue lately, when I had to explain a
> co-worker that gedit compares really well to editors like E or TextMate once
> you have it properly configured with plugins.
>
> Perhaps a more elegant way (than having all plugins installed by default)
> would be an "Add-ons" menu like in Firefox.
>
> Of course there would be required a github repository or something similar.
> Most gedit plugins I installed don't seem to live on the official gnome site
> but come from some random blogs.
>
> Perhaps a gedit plugin could be developed which would be able to access the
> repo then download and extract the plugins requested by the user?
>
> --
> Sebastian Posch
>
> mail sebastianposch at
> http://www.sebastianposch.at/
> +43 680 30 565 41
>
> Schafflerweg 13/3
> 2721 Bad Fischau-Brunn
>
> http://www.sebastianposch.at/download/agb.pdf
>
>
>
> On 12/02/2010 01:00 PM, gedit-list-request gnome org wrote:
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>>    1.  The plugin mentality (Thomas Biggs)
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>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 13:09:15 -0800 (PST)
>> From: Thomas Biggs<tnbiggs yahoo com>
>> To: gedit-list gnome org
>> Subject: [gedit-list] The plugin mentality
>> Message-ID:<660062 60361 qm web83909 mail sp1 yahoo com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>>
>> By supporting plugins, gedit leaves basic features out of its editor.
>>
>> It reminds me of shopping for a really cheap car where you have to special
>> order
>> even the most basic things. "You want seat belts? We can have those
>> installed.
>> Windsheld wipers? What are you, some kind of picky troublemaker?"
>>
>> Now days most text editors have such basic features as block column
>> editing,
>> sorting, and syntax editing for a handful of languages (C++, Java, Python)
>> built-in. With these editors, no matter what machine you log into, you
>> know
>> these features will be there.  Not gedit. It reminds me of ancient text
>> editors
>> like Notepad--useful only for very basic tasks. Certainly Linux deserves
>> better
>> than this.
>>
>> I think that because of plugins, people don't think of putting in these
>> basic
>> features. "You want column editing? We can have that installed!"
>>
>>
>> I think that mentallity is a big mistake. I use gedit on different
>> machines, not
>> all necessarily configured by me. It would be wonderful if I could count
>> on a
>> few more modern but still basic capabilities built into the default text
>> editor.
>>
>>     -tom
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-- 
Ernesto Posse

Modelling and Analysis in Software Engineering
School of Computing
Queen's University - Kingston, Ontario, Canada